An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Almost a third of new cars sold in Norway last year were pure electric, a new world record as the country strives to end sales of fossil-fueled vehicles by 2025. In a bid to cut carbon emissions and air pollution, Norway exempts battery-driven cars from most taxes and offers benefits such as free parking and charging points to hasten a shift from diesel and petrol engines. The independent Norwegian Road Federation (NRF) said on Wednesday that electric cars rose to 31.2 percent of all sales last year, from 20.8 percent in 2017 and just 5.5 percent in 2013, while sales of petrol and diesel cars plunged. The sales figures consolidate Norway's global lead in electric car sales per capita, part of an attempt by Western Europe's biggest producer of oil and gas to transform to a greener economy. For comparison, electric cars had a 2.2 percent share in China in 2017 and 1.2 percent in the United States, according to IEA data.

With the arrival of USB-C a few years back, plugging into laptops, tablets and smartphones became even easier than before. But there are potential security risks. The USB Type-C Authentication Program launched today aims to address such issues. From a report: The new protocol from the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) can be used to validate the authenticity of a cable, charger or hardware at the moment of connection, and stop attacks in their tracks. The USB-IF has chosen DigiCert to operate registrations and certificate authority services for the new specification, which makes use of 128-bit cryptographic-based authentication for certificate format, digital signing, hash and random number generation. "USB Type-C Authentication gives OEMs the opportunity to use certificates that enable host systems to confirm the authenticity of a USB device or USB charger, including such product aspects as the descriptors, capabilities and certification status," said DigiCert in a press release. "This protects against potential damage from non-compliant USB chargers and the risks from maliciously embedded hardware or software in devices attempting to exploit a USB connection."

An anonymous reader shares a report: On Monday, New Year's Eve, a hacker group announced it had breached a law firm handling cases related to the September 11 attacks, and threatened to publicly release a large cache of related internal files unless their ransom demands were met. The news is the latest public extortion attempt from the group known as The Dark Overlord, which has previously targeted a production studio working for Netflix, as well as a host of medical centres and private businesses across the United States. The announcement also signals a slight evolution in The Dark Overlord's strategy, which has expanded on leveraging the media to exert pressure on victims, to now distributing its threats and stolen data in a wider fashion. In its announcement published on Pastebin, The Dark Overlord points to several different insurers and legal firms, claiming specifically that it hacked Hiscox Syndicates Ltd, Lloyds of London, and Silverstein Properties. "Hiscox Syndicates Ltd and Lloyds of London are some of the biggest insurers on the planet insuring everything from the smallest policies to some of the largest policies on the planet, and who even insured structures such as the World Trade Centers," the announcement reads.

In case you needed another reminder that Fortnite was the biggest game of 2018, esports star Ninja says he racked up millions of dollars playing it last year. From a report: Tyler Blevins, aka Ninja, told CNN in a story Monday that he made nearly $10 million last year playing Fortnite: Battle Royale. Blevins has more than 12.5 million followers on game streaming service Twitch and more than 20 million subscribers on streaming giant YouTube. The professional gamer told CNN he made most of his fortune from advertisers on YouTube and Twitch, as well as from video game tournaments and sponsors like Samsung and Red Bull. The famous Fortnite gamer snatched the spotlight when he broke a Twitch viewing record in March. Blevins streamed himself and rapper Drake playing duo in Fortnite, which more than 600,000 people watched live at its peak.

PC gaming stores Steam and GOG have took down the video game Star Control: Origins following DMCA takedown notices issued by two designers of the original Star Control games, Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III. Star Control: Origins, a spiritual successor to the old games, is a strategy game about exploring space in an alternate galaxy. From a report: According to Stardock CEO Brad Wardell, those who have already purchased Origins can continue playing it. He added that the DMCA claim will cause his company "to lay off some of the men and women who are assigned to the game." The legal battle over the future of the Star Control franchise dates back to 2013 when Stardock purchased rights to Star Control intellectual property from Atari during a bankruptcy auction. Three years later, in 2016, Stardock revealed that it was developing Star Control: Origins. At the time, Stardock said it was working under the assumption that it had "acquired the rights to Star Control 1/2/3." Court documents reveal that may not be the case, and that Ford and Reiche may instead have conflicting rights to the IP.

A fifth of Earth's geologic history might have vanished because planet-wide glaciers buried the evidence. From a report: The Grand Canyon is a gigantic geological library, with rocky layers that tell much of the story of Earth's history. Curiously though, a sizeable layer representing anywhere from 250 million years to 1.2 billion years is missing. Known as the Great Unconformity, this massive temporal gap can be found not just in this famous crevasse, but in places all over the world. In one layer, you have the Cambrian period, which started roughly 540 million years ago and left behind sedimentary rocks packed with the fossils of complex, multicellular life. Directly below, you have fossil-free crystalline basement rock, which formed about a billion or more years ago. So where did all the rock that belongs in between these time periods go? Using multiple lines of evidence, an international team of geoscientists reckons that the thief was Snowball Earth, a hypothesized time when much, if not all, of the planet was covered in ice. According to the team, at intervals within those billion or so years, up to a third of Earth's crust was sawn off by Snowball Earth's roaming glaciers and their erosive capabilities. The resulting sediment was dumped into the slush-covered oceans, where it was then sucked into the mantle by subducting tectonic plates. Effectively, in many locations, Earth buried the evidence of about a fifth of its geological history, the team argued this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The notion is elegant but provocative, and the authors themselves predict that some geoscientists will express skepticism. "I think, though, we have extraordinary evidence to support that extraordinary claim," says study leader C. Brenhin Keller, a postdoctoral fellow at the Berkeley Geochronology Center.

The GIMP developers on Wednesday published a blog post in which they look back at the year 2018 (release of GIMP 2.10) and outline the things that they intend to get around this year. From the post: We expect to be shipping 2.10.x updates throughout 2019, starting with the version 2.10.10 currently expected in January/February. This version will feature faster layer groups rendering, smart colorization with the Bucket Fill tool, and various usability improvements. We are also planning the first unstable release of GIMP that will have version 2.99.2, eventually leading up to version 3.0. The prerequisite for releasing that version will be the completion of the space invasion. ZeMarmot project (which can be supported on Patreon or Tipeee) is also planning to focus a bit more on better canvas interactions, as well as animation support improvements, starting from merging existing work. On the GEGL and babl front, we expect to continue working towards better CMYK support and performance.

For years, Mozilla has largely neglected development of Thunderbird, an email client it owns. But the company, which grew its team to eight staff last year, says it plans to address most of the issues that users have complained about and add six more people to Thunderbird staff this year, it said in a blog post. In the blog post Wednesday, the company said: Our hires are already addressing technical debt and doing a fair bit of plumbing when it comes to Thunderbird's codebase. Our new hires will also be addressing UI-slowness and general performance issues across the application. This is an area where I think we will see some of the best improvements in Thunderbird for 2019, as we look into methods for testing and measuring slowness -- and then put our engineers on architecting solutions to these pain points. Beyond that, we will be looking into leveraging new, faster technologies in rewriting parts of Thunderbird as well as working toward a multi-process Thunderbird. [...] For instance, one area of usability that we are planning on addressing in 2019 is integration improvements in various areas. One of those in better Gmail support, as one of the biggest email providers it makes sense to focus some resources on this area. We are looking at addressing Gmail label support and ensuring that other features specific to the Gmail experience translate well into Thunderbird. We are looking at improving notifications in Thunderbird, by better integrating with each operating system's built-in notification system. By working on this feature Thunderbird will feel more "native" on each desktop and will make managing notifications from the app easier. The UX/UI around encryption and settings will get an overhaul in the coming year, whether or not all this work makes it into the next release is an open question â" but as we grow our team this will be a focus. It is our hope to make encrypting Email and ensuring your private communication easier in upcoming releases, we've even hired an engineer who will be focused primarily on security and privacy.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A common belief among tech industry insiders is that Silicon Valley has dominated the internet because much of the worldwide network was designed and built by Americans. Now a growing number of those insiders are worried that proposed export restrictions could short-circuit the pre-eminence of American companies in the next big thing to hit their industry, artificial intelligence. In November, the Commerce Department released a list of technologies, including artificial intelligence, that are under consideration for new export rules because of their importance to national security. Technology experts worry that blocking the export of A.I. to other countries, or tying it up in red tape, will help A.I. industries flourish in those nations -- China, in particular -- and compete with American companies. "The number of cases where exports can be sufficiently controlled are very, very, very small, and the chance of making an error is quite large," said Jack Clark, head of policy at OpenAI, an artificial intelligence lab in San Francisco. "If this goes wrong, it could do real damage to the A.I. community." The export controls are being considered as the United States and China engage in a trade war. The Trump administration has been critical of the way China negotiates deals with American companies, often requiring the transfer of technology to Chinese partners as the cost of doing business in the country. And federal officials are making an aggressive argument that China has stolen American technology through hacking and industrial espionage.

The subways on the East Coast that allowed New York, Washington and Boston to thrive are showing their age and suffering from years of neglect, while cities on the West Coast are moving quickly to expand and improve their networks. From a report: The Los Angeles area, the ultimate car-centric region with its sprawling freeways, approved a sweeping $120 billion plan to build new train routes and upgrade its buses. Seattle has won accolades for its transit system, where 93 percent of riders report being happy with service -- a feat that seems unimaginable in New York, where subway riders regularly simmer with rage on stalled trains. "It's a tale of two systems," said Robert Puentes, the president of the Eno Center for Transportation, a nonpartisan research center in Washington. "These new ones are growing and haven't started to experience the pains of rehabilitation." In New York, Polly Trottenberg, New York City's transportation commissioner, returned to a laundry list of messes: a subway crisis, buses that move at a snail's pace, the looming shutdown of the L train between Manhattan and Brooklyn, and the rebuilding of the dilapidated Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. "There is a political will to invest in expansion" on the West Coast, Ms. Trottenberg said in an interview, though she noted that New York's system was still the country's largest by far. Its daily subway and bus ridership of nearly 8 million dwarfs Los Angeles's 1.2 million riders. Still, transit systems on the East Coast are losing ridership. New York's subway has not expanded in decades, besides a handful of new stations in Manhattan -- one on the Far West Side and three on the Upper East Side.

A popular weather app built by a Chinese tech conglomerate has been collecting an unusual amount of data from smartphones around the world and attempting to subscribe some users to paid services without permission, according to a London-based security firm's research. From a report: The free app, one of the world's most-downloaded weather apps in Google's Play store, is from TCL Communication Technology Holdings, of Shenzhen, China. TCL makes Alcatel- and BlackBerry -branded phones, while a sister company makes televisions. The app, called "Weather Forecast --World Weather Accurate Radar," collects data including smartphone users' geographic locations, email addresses and unique 15-digit International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) numbers on TCL servers in China, according to Upstream Systems, the mobile commerce and security firm that found the activity. Until last month, the app was known as "Weather -- Simple weather forecast." The weather app also has attempted to surreptitiously subscribe more than 100,000 users of its low-cost Alcatel smartphones in countries such as Brazil, Malaysia and Nigeria to paid virtual-reality services, according to Upstream Systems. The security firm, which discovered the activity as part of its work for mobile operators, said users would have been billed more than $1.5 million had it not blocked the attempts.

Alphabet's Google unit has won the approval from U.S. regulators to deploy a radar-based motion sensing device known as Project Soli. From a report: The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said in an order late on Monday that it would grant Google a waiver to operate the Soli sensors at higher power levels than currently allowed. The FCC said the sensors can also be operated aboard aircraft. The FCC said the decision "will serve the public interest by providing for innovative device control features using touchless hand gesture technology." The FCC said the Soli sensor captures motion in a three-dimensional space using a radar beam to enable touchless control of functions or features that can benefit users with mobility or speech impairments.

A research group in Japan has developed an inexpensive, large-scale and flexible thermoelectric generator (FlexTEG) that has high mechanical reliability and can convert heat into electricity efficiently. The findings are published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies. From a report: Thermoelectric conversion is one of the most attractive techniques for converting low-temperature (150C or lower) waste heat into electric power. However, widespread adoption of this technology has been hampered by a lack of suitable packaging techniques for thermoelectric generation modules that can operate in the 100-150C range. In addition, the production cost of modules for generating power at room temperature was prohibitive. In the present study, scientists at Osaka University, Japan, have developed a method to manufacture thermoelectric generation modules in a cost-efficient manner while preserving the conversion efficiency of the modules. They mounted small thermoelectric semiconductor chips on a flexible substrate and were able to achieve reliable and stable adhesion of the electrical contacts between the chips and the flexible substrate. They called their invention FlexTEG.

When it comes to particle accelerators, magnets are one key to success. Powerful magnetic fields keep particle beams "on track" as they're ramped up to higher energy, crashed into collisions for physics experiments, or delivered to patients to zap tumors. Innovative magnets have the potential to improve all these applications. That's one aim of the Cornell-Brookhaven "Energy-Recovery Linac" Test Accelerator, or CBETA, under construction at Cornell University and funded by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). CBETA relies on a beamline made of cutting-edge magnets designed by physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory that can carry four beams at very different energies at the same time. "Scientists and engineers in Brookhaven's Collider-Accelerator Department (C-AD) just completed the production and assembly of 216 exceptional quality fixed-field, alternating gradient, permanent magnets for this project—an important milestone," said C-AD Chair Thomas Roser, who oversees the Lab's contributions to CBETA. The novel magnet design, developed by Brookhaven physicist Stephen Brooks and C-AD engineer George Mahler, has a fixed magnetic field that varies in strength at different points within each circular magnet's aperture. "Instead of having to ramp up the magnetic field to accommodate beams of different energies, beams with different energies simply find their own 'sweet spot' within the aperture," said Brooks. The result: Beams at four different energies can pass through a single beamline simultaneously. In CBETA, a chain of these magnets strung together like beads on a necklace will form what's called a return loop that repeatedly delivers bunches of electrons to a linear accelerator (linac). Four trips through the superconducting radiofrequency cavities of the linac will ramp up the electrons' energy, and another four will ramp them down so the energy stored in the beam can be recovered and reused for the next round of acceleration. "The bunches at different energies are all together in the return loop, with alternating magnetic fields keeping them oscillating along their individual paths, but then they merge and enter the linac sequentially," explained C-AD chief mechanical engineer Joseph Tuozzolo. "As one bunch goes through and gets accelerated, another bunch gets decelerated and the energy recovered from the deceleration can accelerate the next bunch." Even when the beams are used for experiments, the energy recovery is expected to be close to 99.9 percent, making this "superconducting energy recovery linac (ERL)" a potential game changer in terms of efficiency. New bunches of near-light-speed electrons are brought up to the maximum energy every microsecond, so fresh beams are always available for experiments. That's one of the big advantages of using permanent magnets. Electromagnets, which require electricity to change the strength of the magnetic field, would never be able to ramp up fast enough, he explained. Using permanent fixed field magnets that require no electricity—like the magnets that stick to your refrigerator, only much stronger—avoids that problem and reduces the energy/cost required to run the accelerator. To prepare the magnets for CBETA, the Brookhaven team started with high-quality permanent magnet assemblies produced by KYMA, a magnet manufacturing company, based on the design developed by Brooks and Mahler. C-AD's Tuozzolo organized and led the procurement effort with KYMA and the acquisition of the other components for the return loop. Engineers in Brookhaven's Superconducting Magnet Division took precise measurements of each magnet's field strength and used a magnetic field correction system developed and built by Brooks to fine-tune the fields to achieve the precision needed for CBETA. Mahler then led the assembly of the finished magnets onto girder plates that will hold them in perfect alignment in the finished accelerator, while C-AD engineer Robert Michnoff led the effort to build and test electronics for beam position monitors that will track particle paths through the beamline. "Brookhaven's CBETA team reached the goals of this milestone nine days earlier than scheduled thanks to the work of extremely dedicated people performing multiple magnetic measurements and magnet surveys over many long work days," Roser said. The Brookhaven-assembled components are now en route to Cornell for the final accelerator assembly. The CBETA team will begin commissioning the accelerator in March 2019, running it through the first steps toward full functionality. The technologies developed for CBETA could revolutionize accelerator science with multiple potential applications, the team says. For example, such an ERL would be an efficient way to accelerate and reuse beams of electrons to cool beams of heavy ions at a proposed future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) being considered by the DOE Office of Nuclear Physics. The peak energy CBETA expects to achieve in its electron beam would be a perfect match for extracting excess heat from ion beams to keep the ions tightly bunched—a requirement for maximizing particle interactions in a collider. The innovative magnet technology developed for CBETA could also be used in accelerators that produce medical isotopes, etch computer chips at ever-smaller scales, or deliver high-energy proton or particle beams to precisely target tumors. Beam-delivery systems made of small-scale permanent magnets could dramatically reduce the cost of particle-beam cancer-therapy accelerators, potentially making this promising treatment more widely available. "It's exciting to be part of a project that has so many possibilities for basic science and for society," Brooks said.

New developments in antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) with antibiofilm properties are rapidly materializing. ABP works by inhibiting antibiotic resistant bacteria in the biofilm through nucleotide signaling molecules. Antimicrobial peptides and antibiofilm peptide (ABP) are new antibiotic molecules derived from microorganisms for the treatment of infections. The authors have discussed significance, limitations and trials of these antimicrobial peptides from bacteria, fungi, protozoa and yeast. These antimicrobial peptides are small, cationic and amphipathic polypeptide sequences with a wide range for Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, viruses and fungi with 6-100 amino acids in length. These sources are reviewed in detail showing characterization of these antimicrobial peptides and their respective classes. The APD3 database showed 333 bacteriocin and peptide antibiotics from bacteria, 4 fromarchaea, 8 from protists, 13 from fungi are reported. Bacterial AMP are characterized according to their amino acid numbers and are so small in size with 1-5 kDa mass as compared to Class II AMPs are longer with amino acid number is about 25-50. Class II bacteriocins are composed of homogeneous amino acids and classified into different groups based on their secondary structure. Class II Lactococcin produced by Lactococcus lactis is Lactococcin B. This AMP is involved in changes of membrane potential. The reported fungal AMP compounds are more than bacterial AMP and found to be a good source of antimicrobial compounds discovery against infections due to similarity in features and responses to infections. The in silico cDNA scanning method is widely used for determining the sequencing of Defensin like peptides and more than 100 AMP's are revealed with the help of genome screening approaches. Fungal AMP's Peptaibols isolated as secondary metabolites from possesses anti-microbial and anti-fungal activities. They have short amino acid chains.

Teams that come from behind do not have a greater chance of winning in overtime, according to Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers in a study published in the Journal of Economic Psychology, debunking theories of how psychological momentum in sports and in life lead to success. "People talk about momentum as an indicator for success in business, sports and politics," says Dr. Elia Morgulev from the BGU Department of Management, Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management. "However, after studying close to 900 tied games with fourth quarter comebacks over 11 National Basketball Association seasons, we found that regardless of momentum, teams with the home advantage and more season wins were more likely to succeed in the five-minute overtime." Dr. Morgulev, along with Profs. Ofer H. Azar and Michael Bar-Eli of BGU's Department of Business Administration, Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management, are the first to analyze the effect of fourth quarter comebacks on overtime performance to address the larger question of whether or not recent success creates enough psychological momentum to make a positive impact on subsequent team and individual performance. Contrary to common beliefs, the researchers found momentum did not carry over after the end of a tied fourth quarter to help teams win in overtime, regardless of the size of the previous score gap. What did make a difference in improving a team's likelihood of winning was both home advantage and the balance of power between the teams—measured by the difference in teams' season wins. "These findings raise questions for future research," says Prof. Bar-Eli. "Why don't we observe momentum in situations where success should lead to psychological and physiological gains?" Bar-Eli raises the following questions: Could the momentum of a comeback team be offset by a more aggressive, focused and motivated team that feels it was robbed of its win and must now go into overtime? Could the comeback team be so exhausted that they lose momentum? Could releasing tension during even a brief break before overtime cause a team to relax because they feel they've achieved their target of not losing and then lose any potential momentum? Dr. Morgulev, who is also the head of physical education studies in the nearby Kaye Academic College of Education says, "these findings are also relevant in the education field as current pedagogy is obsessed with promoting the experience of success. They often neglect the importance of obstacles and failures in building of a character and in fostering inner motivation to overcome and prevail." Ultimately, the researchers ask: Why do people tend to associate NBA comebacks with psychological momentum, even though data does not support it? "It seems intuitive to expect a comeback team to benefit from momentum," says Prof. Azar. "So perhaps when a team that closed a gap in the fourth quarter does win in overtime, it stands out more in people's memories and reinforces a common belief over time."

Most hummingbirds have bills and tongues exquisitely designed to slip inside a flower, lap up nectar and squeeze every last drop of precious sugar water from their tongue to fuel their frenetic lifestyle. But in the tropics of South America, University of California, Berkeley, scientists are finding that some male hummers have traded efficient feeding for bills that are better at stabbing and plucking other hummingbirds as they fend off rivals for food and mates. The males' weaponized bills are good not only for pulling feathers and pinching skin, but also wrestling their rivals away from prime feeding spots. Using high-speed video cameras, the researchers have for the first time captured hummingbird fencing and feeding strategies in slow motion to document the various ways the birds use their bills to fight and the trade-offs they accept when choosing fighting over feeding prowess. "We understand hummingbirds' lives as being all about drinking efficiently from flowers, but then suddenly we see these weird morphologies—stiff bills, hooks and serrations like teeth—that don't make any sense in terms of nectar collection efficiency," said Alejandro Rico-Guevara, a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley and the lead scientist on the project. "Looking at these bizarre bill tips, you would never expect that they're from a hummingbird or that they would be useful to squeeze the tongue." Straighter bills are better for poking, which may explain why in some species females have curved bills to sip inside the curved bells of flowers but the males' beaks are less curved. This has sometimes forced the males to feed on different flowers than the females, ones more adapted to a straighter beak. "It is all about feeding efficiency in flowers versus proficiency in fighting," he said. Rico-Guevara acknowledged that hummingbirds have long been known as fierce fighters—they even attack hawks, owls and other birds if they perceive a threat—but the fights happen so fast that scientists haven't been able to see the actual outcome. Feisty hummingbirds prioritize fencing over feeding Sparkling violetear (Colibri coruscans) and Brown violetear (Colibri delphinae) displaying their neck-side feathers, so called "ears", trying to dissuade each other from using their bill weapons: strongly serrated bill edges and dagger-like …more "Because it happens so fast and they fly away, you can't track them," he said. "But also, people haven't actually looked at the details of the beaks. We are making connections between how feisty they are, the beak morphology behind that and what that implies for their competitiveness." Rico-Guevara is the lead author of a paper describing how the shape of the bill affects hummingbird feeding and fighting strategies in the January 2019 issue of the journal Integrative Organismal Biology. Nectar fuels their lives Rico-Guevara has been photographing and videotaping hummingbirds for more than a decade, often in the lush forests of his native Colombia, to understand how they have adapted to specialized niches. Some hummers, for example, feed on only one type of flower, a result of the flower and bird having evolved together. In some cases, a bird's beak won't fit in any other flower, while that flower's feeding tube is shaped so that no other birds' beak can slide in to get the nectar efficiently. This relationship provides a secure source of food—nectar—for the bird and a guaranteed pollinator for the plant. In the new paper, Rico-Guevara describes what he has discovered to date about the exquisite beak design that most hummingbirds, including North American hummers, have evolved for feeding, and the unique features of hummingbirds' forked tongues. He has shown, for instance, that their tongues are able to change shape quickly without an internal muscle, allowing them to pump and trap nectar without spending any additional energy: another stunning example of their efficiency, he said. "Extracting nectar is what fuels their lives," he said. As a result, they have developed "very flexible bills with very soft edges, soft, blunt bill tips that are concave, like a couple of spoons, that perfectly match the tongue to squeeze out the last drop of nectar. All of these traits make a good seal between the tongue tips that actually enhances the efficiency of nectar extraction." Yet in the tropics, including Colombia, Brazil, Peru and Costa Rica, males of many species don't fit this picture. Instead, they have stiff bills with a hard, conical, dagger-like tip, often hooked, plus rear-facing serrations like the teeth of a comb. High-speed video shows that the stiff, hard-tipped bill is ideal for poking other birds, while the hooked tip and serrations are a perfect way to snatch a feather or two. The males' wings are also adapted to be more aerodynamic—for in-flight fights—than are female wings. PlayPlay Seek 01:02 Current time01:33 Toggle Mute Volume Toggle Fullscreen Hummingbirds' bills are well adapted to sipping nectar, but in some species, males have weaponized bills that seem to sacrifice sipping prowess for fighting prowess. Is there a tradeoff? Credit: Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally, UC Berkeley. …more The weaponized bills of these males are unsuited to efficient nectar sipping, however, Rico-Guevara said, though he does not yet have data on how much less efficient their bills are because of these types of serrations and a hooked tip. The evolution of these unusual bills in tropical hummingbirds appears to be a result of increased competition. Elsewhere in the Americas, three or four hummingbird species may compete with one another in a given habitat; in the tropics, there could be 15. "We have discovered that these traits may be related to a different kind of strategy: instead of feeding on a particular flower shape very well, some birds try to exclude everybody from a patch of flowers, even though they can't feed as well on them as hummingbirds without bill weapons," Rico-Guevara said. "If you are good enough at keeping your competitors away, then it doesn't matter how well you use the resources in the flowers you are defending, you have them all to yourself." Not all fighters use their bills to protect their food. Others use their bills primarily to out-fence males competing for females at gathering places called leks. "A lek is like a singles bar, a place where many males get together and sing, sing, sing all the time," Rico-Guevara said. "The females go to these small spaces in the forest and pick a male to mate with. If you can get a seat at that bar, it is going to give you the opportunity to reproduce. So they don't fight for access to resources, like in the territorial species, but they actually fight for an opportunity to reproduce. And in the brief moments when there is no fighting, they go to feed on different flowers." He and his colleagues are continuing to study the adaptations that accompany hummingbirds' feeding and mating strategies in Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America, including why females and many other males, who also occasionally fight one another, have not weaponized their bills.

In the early 1990s, Acton Lake in southwestern Ohio had a muddy problem. Large amounts of sediment from nearby farms were entering the lake's watershed. These sediments traveled through streams draining the landscape and were filling up the lake. So, the USDA gave local farmers incentives to change some of their farming practices. One of these practices was conservation tillage, in which the soil is plowed less often. That can reduce sediment runoff. A new study examines how the switch to conservation tillage has impacted Acton Lake over the past decades. From 1994 to 2014, the researchers measured concentrations of suspended sediment, nitrogen, and phosphorus in streams draining into Acton Lake. "We find that short-term trends in water quality may not reflect long-term changes," says study co-author Michael Vanni. Tracking changes in water quality over the long term is vital, says Vanni, a biologist at Miami University, Ohio. "We don't have a lot of long-term information on how water quality in a stream or lake responds to agricultural change," he says. That might be surprising since many ecologists study agricultural watersheds. But according to Vanni, studies on a given ecosystem are usually short term. "Long-term studies, like ours, can reveal important shifts in water quality," says Vanni. "Many of the changes we observed can only be seen after studying the streams for 20 plus years." Vanni and his colleagues found that water quality responses were different during the first decade of the study (1994-2003) compared to the next (2004-2014). They also discovered that concentrations of suspended sediment, nitrogen, and phosphorus each reacted differently. Levels of suspended sediment declined throughout the entire study period. However, the decline was much sharper in the first ten years. Phosphorus and nitrogen levels had contrasting outcomes. "The concentration of dissolved phosphorus in the streams declined sharply during the first ten years," says Vanni. "But then, phosphorus levels increased over the next ten years." Long term ag change impacts stream water quality The inside of the automated sampler on Four Mile Creek, with the carousel of bottles used to collect water samples. The PVC pipe to the left houses a pressure transducer connected to a data logger and records the stage (height) of the …more In contrast, nitrogen levels didn't change much in the first ten years. After that, they fell sharply. The study focused on the watershed of the Upper Four Mile Creek, which drains into Acton Lake. Most of the surrounding area is made up of corn and soybean farms. The researchers have monitored farming practices in the area since 1989 and water quality since 1994. The long-term changes seen in this study indicate that there might be tradeoffs in managing different aspects of water quality. "The main reason to encourage conservation tillage was to reduce soil erosion and sedimentation in Acton Lake," says Vanni. "That has clearly been successful. Sediment inputs to the lake have declined." Nitrogen levels are also declining. "That's great for local freshwater ecosystems," says Vanni. "It's also beneficial to the Gulf of Mexico, where some of our runoff eventually travels." On the other hand, rising phosphorus levels are a cause for concern. "They could promote algal blooms downstream," says Vanni. "We might need to consider the tradeoffs involved in managing for sediments, nitrogen, or phosphorus." It's not completely clear how the study findings would apply to other areas. However, the changes in water quality observed in this study are similar to those seen in some of the rivers that drain into Lake Erie. High phosphorus levels are a problem in those watersheds as well. In fact, "high levels of phosphorus are implicated in causing increased blooms of harmful algae in Lake Erie," says Vanni. Vanni and colleagues hope to continue measuring changes in suspended sediments, nitrogen, and phosphorus in the Acton Lake watershed. "We are also looking at the response of the Acton Lake ecosystem to these changes," says Vanni. "It will be really interesting to observe these changes over the next ten years, both from a scientific perspective as well as for water quality management."

Arguably, one of the world's most famous insects, the monarch butterfly, is currently experiencing dire problems with its migration in eastern North America. Fewer and fewer monarchs are successfully reaching their overwintering destinations, and scientists aren't sure why. Because of this, the need for research on the migration has never been more urgent. New research published in De Gruyter's Open Access journal Animal Migration, aims to help with this effort. The dwindling numbers of overwintering monarchs in the mountains of central Mexico have been the subject of debate among researchers, with some arguing it reflects a large-scale drop in numbers of breeding adults, while others point to increasingly perilous migration as the cause. Now, a new research study "Alternate migration strategies of eastern monarch butterflies revealed by stable isotopes" led by Dr. Hannah Vander Zanden, from the University of Florida, throws another potential explanation into the mix—maybe the monarchs are simply travelling elsewhere to overwinter, like to the balmy coast of southern Florida. Dr. Vander Zanden and her team captured and examined monarchs that wintered in South Florida, using a special analytical technique that can pinpoint where the monarchs came from based on a sample of their wing or body tissue. Amazingly, they discovered that half of the monarchs sampled appeared to originate from the American Midwest, which is typically thought to represent the core breeding range of the eastern population. For years, researchers assumed that monarchs from this region only travel to the mountainous region of Mexico each fall. But, this new discovery means that at least some of the Midwestern monarchs are choosing not to fly to Mexico after all, and instead they appear to fly in nearly the opposite direction until they reach southern Florida. "Previous research had suggested that some migrating monarchs may wind up in southern Florida if they become waylaid by strong westerly winds, but this evidence makes it seem like they purposely travelled to this location," says Andy Davis, noted expert in monarch migration from University of Georgia and editor of the journal. This discovery could bear on the issue of the shrinking overwintering population in Mexico, especially if more of these "alternative" overwintering locations are found. This research was recently published along with four other studies that focused on monarch migration, in a themed collection in the journal. "Collectively, these studies demonstrate that we still have so much to learn about this phase of the monarch life cycle in North America. And, given the issues facing the migration itself, this work couldn't come at a better time," said Davis.

The more a company's board is independent from management, the less likely it will become entangled in corporate misconduct, according to new findings, from a meta-analysis of 135 studies, published in The Journal of Management. The site of independence also matters. Independence on the audit committee particularly shelters firms from misconduct, researchers found. At the same time, accepted levels of corruption in countries where firms are located can overpower the effects of board independence on misconduct. The study is the first to evaluate the link between board independence and misconduct worldwide, and to compare the effectiveness of three different "sites" of independence: the board overall, the audit committee and CEO-chair separation, said Corinne Post, professor of management at Lehigh University. Post co-authored the paper "Board Independence and Corporate Misconduct: A Cross-National Meta-Analysis" with Andrew Ward of Lehigh University and lead authors François Neville of McMaster University and Kris Byron of Georgia State University. The study is the first to meta-analyze the relationship between board independence and misconduct. "Examining board independence in relation to misconduct is important, given the far-reaching negative consequences of misconduct," the researchers said. "Corporate misconduct damages firm reputation, increases employee turnover, harms customers and other stakeholders, and ultimately incurs losses for shareholders." Independence to curb misconduct Board independence is a commonly offered solution to curbing corporate misconduct. In the wake of the global financial crisis and high-profile corporate scandals at firms such as Siemens, Enron, Toshiba, Olympus and WorldCom, practitioners and policy makers have looked to increased board independence as a governance mechanism to deter misconduct. A lack of board independence is considered a key contributing factor to the Volkswagen emissions scandal. Thus, many countries have adopted rules about board independence. For example, India, Hungary, Korea and the United States require that boards be primarily composed of independent directors, and Japan requires companies with no independent directors to justify why appointing one is not appropriate. Other countries, however, such as New Zealand and Luxembourg, have minimal or no independence requirements. The notion that board independence is synonymous with good governance and can help curb corporate misconduct reflects an established view that independent directors are better positioned to impartially and dispassionately monitor firm managers and their policies and to curb any opportunistic management behavior. "Overall, independent directors, as compared to inside or affiliated directors, are expected to be more vigilant in their efforts to identify and snuff out corporate misconduct because, compared to inside or affiliated directors, they are more able to focus on the firm's operational, financial and strategic irregularities and more motivated to monitor and curb misconduct to protect their personal reputations," the researchers said. Increasingly, however, some scholars are questioning whether board independence is an adequate solution to the problem of corporate misconduct. For example, barriers such as outside job demands and norms of deference can prevent independent directors from being effective monitors. "Because the empirical evidence is mixed, we set out to draw on the universe of studies and available data to settle the question," Post said. The researchers identified all existing studies on board independence and organizational misconduct, conducting a meta-analysis of 135 studies representing almost 80,000 firms in more than 20 countries. First global meta-analysis of board independence For the study, researchers define corporate misconduct as activities or actions that organizational members engage in to deceive or swindle investors or other key stakeholders, including acts that violate laws or regulations or that are legal but are considered morally wrong. Examples include accounting fraud, regulator violations, actions resulting in class action lawsuits, and anti-competitive actions such as monopoly, conspiracy or price-fixing. Independence refers to directors who have no substantive relationship with the firm as employees or in any other capacity beyond their role on the board. The researchers looked at different variants of board independence, such as independent directors on the whole board, independent directors on the audit committee, and the chair role being independent of the CEO role. The researchers found that the independence of a board as a whole was more likely to correlate to less corporate misconduct, as was a structure in which the firm CEO and board chair positions were separate. The strongest correlation among the variants of board independence was the audit committee, primarily tasked with overseeing financial reporting processes, regulatory compliance and risk management, suggesting that it has the greatest potential to curb wrongdoing, Post said. The effect of an independent audit committee was associated with less misconduct across all of the countries studied, regardless of corruption level. However, the extent to which board independence and CEO-chair separation may curb misconduct depends on the country's institutions. "These governance mechanisms appear less capable of preventing misconduct in countries with high corruption norms," said Post, who was surprised at the extent to which corruption norms can overpower the board independence-misconduct reduction link. The researchers also found that while board independence is often touted as enabling higher firm performance, the board independence-misconduct relationship was about twice as large as the relationship others have found between board independence and firm performance. "Our findings on the influence of audit committee independence in reducing corporate misconduct offer an initial demonstration of the potentially wide-ranging influence of important board committees (such as audit, compensation or nominating committees) over firm behavior and performance," Post said. Another takeaway is to consider the country context when discussing governance. The popular governance practice of increasing board independence must both account for the manner in which independence is implemented and consider the powerful influence of firms' broader societal context to clearly understand its effect, the researchers observed. "We demonstrate that the governance mechanism of board independence cannot function effectively across the globe if corruption is endemic in certain countries or regions," Post said. The findings may inform practice and contribute to policy discussions about tightening board independence requirements, Post said.

Seagrass beds are so effective in protecting tropical beaches from erosion, that they can reduce the need for regular, expensive beach nourishments that are used now. In a recent article in the journal BioScience, biologists and engineers from The Netherlands and Mexico describe experiments and field observations around the Caribbean Sea. "A foreshore with both healthy seagrass beds as well as calcifying algae, is a resilient and sustainable option in coastal defense", says lead author Rebecca James, Ph.D.-candidate at the University of Groningen and the Royal Dutch Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), The Netherlands. "Because of erosion, the economic value of Caribbean beaches literally drains into the sea." Increasing erosion with climate change The authors looked at beaches of the Caribbean Sea, where almost a quarter of the Gross Domestic Product is earned in tourism, mainly around the beaches. "With the increase of coastal development, the natural flow of water and sand is disrupted, natural ecosystems are damaged, and many tropical beaches have already disappeared into the sea", co-author Rodolfo Silva, professor of Coastal Engineering at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma of Mexico says. "Until now, expensive coastal engineering efforts, such as repeated beach nourishments and concrete walls to protect the coast, have been made to combat erosion. Rising sea-level and increasing storms will only increase the loss of these important beaches." Experimental flume To find out to what extent seagrass beds are able to hold sand and sediment on the beach foreshores, James and her promotor, professor Tjeerd Bouma (NIOZ and Utrecht University), conducted a simple but telling experiment. With a portable and adjustable field flume to regulate water motion in a Caribbean bay, they observed when particles on the sea bed started moving. "We showed that seagrass beds were extremely effective at holding sediment in place", James says. "Especially in combination with calcifying algae that "create their own sand", a foreshore with healthy seagrass appeared a sustainable way of combating erosion." Seagrass saves beaches and money Regular sand nourishments are required on Cancun beach to maintain it, but start eroding immediately. Credit: Rodolfo Silva More seagrass, less erosion Along the coastline of the Mexican peninsula of Yucatan, the team put their theory to the test. "By looking at beaches with and without protection of healthy seagrass beds, we showed that the amount of erosion was strongly linked to the amount of vegetation: more seagrass, meant less erosion", co-author dr. Brigitta van Tussenbroek of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma in Mexico says. "At beaches where seagrass beds were destroyed, the researchers saw a sudden strong increase in erosion, resulting in an immediate need of expensive beach nourishments. Promising future prospects Both NGO's and engineering industry welcome these novel insights. "To date, seagrass beds are too often regarded as a nuisance, rather than a valuable asset for preserving touristically valuable coastlines. This study could change this perspective completely", Bas Roels of World Wildlife Fund Netherlands says. "The study opens opportunities for developing new tropical-beach protection schemes, in which ecology is integrated in engineering solutions", adds Mark van Koningsveld, professor at the Delft University of Technology and working for the international marine contractor Van Oord. According to co-author Johan Stapel of the Caribbean Netherlands Science Institute (CSNI) on St. Eustatius this will require a multilateral approach in conservation and restoration, as seagrass faces increasing pressure from various sources of pollution and invasive species. "Fortunately, NIOZ has a strong tradition in successfully restoring all kinds of coastal vegetation from seagrass to mangroves", Bouma concludes.

Last month's eruption of the Anak Krakatau volcano in Indonesia and the deadly tsunami that followed caused two University of Rhode Island scientists to spring to action. Tsunami expert Stephan Grilli and volcanologist Steven Carey were planning to visit the site next summer to conduct surveys of the seafloor nearby. The area around Anak Krakatau is the former site of the Krakatau volcano, which erupted in 1883 and is still considered one of the largest catastrophic volcanic eruptions in modern history. The recent eruption of Anak Krakatau—which means "son of Krakatau—is providing Grilli and Carey with a new opportunity to gain additional insights and create models that they hope will help the United States better prepare for future tsunamis. "Having real-time evidence like this allows us to test our ideas and validate our models," said Grilli, a professor of ocean engineering whose research contributes to the U.S. National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program. "We have seismic sources, volcanic islands and underwater landslides in the Atlantic and the Pacific that could cause tsunamis to hit our coastlines. So we're creating tsunami simulations and maps to show the potential inundation we could face." Through episodic bursts of lava called Strombolian eruptions, Anak Krakatau had been growing steadily since it emerged from the sea in 1928. Those bursts grew in intensity beginning last June, but on December 22 the volcano collapsed during an eruption. This type of collapse and associated tsunami had been anticipated in a paper published in 2012. "But it came without warning, so people were taken by surprise," said Grilli. More than 430 people were killed by the tsunami. Using tide gauges, satellite images and photographs, Grilli created a model of the volcanic flank collapse caused by the eruption that shows how part of the southwest side of the volcano slid into the water and generated the tsunami. "Close to the source, our model predicts the maximum wave height was about 40 meters, and there were multiple waves created with a short interval between them," he said. "The maximum reported impact was a wave of more than 16 feet at the village of Sumur on the coast of Java." The volcano has been greatly reduced in size and is still very active, which could cause difficulties for Grilli and Carey if they want to get close enough to survey the area around it in the coming months. "A big part of the volcano failed, and from a volcanological standpoint, seawater now has access to the vent, allowing water to mix with the hot magma," explained Carey. "That water flashes to steam and ruptures the magma, causing an explosive eruption. The result is going to be a different style of volcanism that will take place there in the future. It's a situation that has many hazards and will influence whether we can get close to it." Ideally, the scientists and their colleagues will maneuver a ship close enough to collect samples of the material that slid into the ocean, assess the volume of the material and how far it traveled along the seafloor. "Now we're estimating the volume of the collapse based on radar images, but we can't see the submarine part of the collapse," Carey said. Grilli and Carey were awarded a $489,000 grant from the National Science Foundation last spring to survey the site of the 1883 eruption, along with a matching grant to colleagues from England and California. They still intend to follow their original plan, though the recent eruption may move up their timeline. Their objective is to study the underwater deposits of lava from the 1883 eruption because many questions still remain about it. That eruption caused a 50-foot tsunami wave that wreaked havoc on the islands of Java and Sumatra, but scientists are still uncertain exactly how it happened. "The idea is that new surveys will help us recreate the mechanism of the eruption so we can model the tsunami that followed," said Grilli. "There are three possibilities, the most likely of which is a discharge of hot pyroclastic flows into the sea, but to prove it we need more data to simulate it." "There wasn't just one tsunami in 1883, there were many. And there wasn't just one mechanism for the eruption," added Carey. "We still have to explain how multiple tsunamis happened." Carey has studied the eruption of Krakatau since the late 1980s with URI faculty member Haraldur Sigurdsson, but for most of that time they studied it from a volcanological perspective. This is the first time it is being assessed using Grilli's sophisticated tsunami models. "When Krakatau erupted, there were no people there, but the energy of the eruption was transferred over a much larger area via the tsunami," Carey said. "There are present-day volcanoes that could have the same mechanism and create devastating tsunamis that we need to be prepared for today."

By studying the behavior of a deck of cards, and stacks of other materials, like steel and aluminum, scientists at Drexel University are proving the existence of a buckling phenomenon that happens inside layered materials when they are put under pressure. The discovery could shape the way researchers—from structural and mechanical engineers to geologists and seismologists—study the way things deform under pressure. This phenomenon, described as "kinking non-linear elastic" behavior by the researchers in Drexel's Department of Materials Science and Engineering who first reported it in 2016, is best described as the separation and buckling of the internal layers of a material as they are compressed from the sides. Common examples are the way the cards in a deck of playing cards bend when you squeeze them from the edges without allowing the cards to separate, or how a ripple will sometimes form in a carpet if it is pushed from the edge. In pressurized environments like this, whether at the card table or in the middle of tectonic plates, something has to give. Their theory explains exactly what that "give" looks like and how it happens. In their recent paper "Ripplocations: A Universal Deformation Mechanism in Solids," published in the journal Physical Review Materials, the researchers provide the first look at these internal waves, dubbed "ripplocations," that can be observed by the naked eye. "What we did here was show that ripplocations exist at the macro level and then modelled them at the atomic level, and showed that the response was basically the same " said Michel Barsoum Ph.D., Distinguished professor in Drexel's College of Engineering and lead author of the paper. "This is the first time ripplocations have been seen in action and helped us understand why they are reversible" Barsoum's previous work suggested the existence of ripplocations by using atomistic simulations of bulk materials. This report clearly demonstrates the formation of ripple bands—interior layers that are buckled in wave-like formations—as they form in a stack of cards, thin steel and aluminum sheets when they are laterally compressed while confined. "The experiment we carried out is quite simple actually. In one case, we confined a deck of cards from the sides and pushed on them from the top. At a given load, buckling occurs, but because the deck is confined, they behave as waves that are fully reversible," said Leslie Lamberson, Ph.D., an associate professor in the College of Engineering and a co-author of the paper. "Using atomic simulations we show that in graphite, like in the card deck, ripplocations nucleate sometime before the material reaches its failure point and until it reaches that point, the behavior is fully reversible—if the pressure is removed, the ripples dissipate and the layers return to their original shape," said Garritt Tucker, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the Colorado School of Mines and a co-author of the paper. They also observed that ripple bands form all at once, with the waves emerging en masse as the load is applied. The height of the ripples, or amplitude, increased with the load. "This paper shows that ripplocations are scale independent," Barsoum said. "This first investigation showed that ripplocations exist and are more or less fully reversible and that they dissipate energy in a manner that we have observed in layered solids at the atomic scale for more than a decade now. But demonstrating the same behavior in layered materials that we can see directly, is an important step toward proving that the behavior happens in materials of all sizes." Barsoum suggests this research could one day inform geologists studying the deformation of layered geologic formations, as well as helping us to better understand the plate tectonic behavior that cause earthquakes. "The research on the deformation of layered systems in general has been on their failure. In this work, we show that there is an important, non-linear elastic regime that precedes failure that has, as far as we are aware, been almost totally neglected. The case we made, however, that understanding this regime is crucial and fundamental for understanding all others," they write.

As scientific funding becomes increasingly scarce, professors in STEM fields spend more time in their offices writing grant applications: by one estimate, as much as one-fifth of their research time. That takes time and energy away from teaching students, training young researchers and making discoveries that boost our collective knowledge and well-being. Two scientists believe that, with professors vying for such a small pool of funds, the grant-application process has become a competition not over who has the best ideas, but who is the best at writing grant applications. In a paper published Jan. 2 in the journal PLOS Biology, co-authors Carl Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington, and Kevin Gross, a professor of statistics at North Carolina State University, use the economic theory of contests to illustrate how this competitive system has made the pursuit of research funding inefficient and unsustainable. They show that alternative methods, such as a partial lottery to award grants, could help get professors back in the lab where they belong. To receive a grant today, professors apply to funding agencies like the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health. Reviewers evaluate and rank the applications, and the highest-ranking applications receive grant funding. But over time, the percentage of proposals that receive funding has dropped dramatically. This is largely because the pool of available funds has not grown to keep pace with the number of STEM researchers. "Back in the 1970s, the top 40 to 50 percent of applications to agencies were funded," said Bergstrom. "Agencies merely had to separate the good research plans from the bad based on the grant applications." Funding thresholds for grant applications have tightened steadily since the 1970s. In 2003, only the top 20 percent of research project grant applications to the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases were funded. In 2013, the success rate had plummeted to 8 percent. Gross and Bergstrom argue that the funding pool has grown so small relative to the number of applicants that the nature of the grant-application process had changed. "When agencies only fund the top 10 or 20 percent, they aren't just separating bad ideas from good ideas," said Bergstrom. "They're also separating good from good." "This has two effects on the grant-application process," said Gross. "First, professors must apply for more and more grants before they're awarded one. Second, the application process becomes a contest to determine who can write the best grant proposals—so professors spend more and more time trying to perfect each individual application." Gross and Bergstrom realized that today's grant-application process can be described using the economic theory of contests. In contest theory, teams compete to produce a product or complete a task for an agency; the agency picks a winner and retains the fruits of the team's efforts, while the winning team receives a prize such as cash. For the Netflix Prize, for example, teams competed to produce an algorithm that would predict how users would rank films on its streaming service. Netflix received the winning algorithm, while the winning team pocketed $1 million. "If we were to apply contest theory to grants, then professors are the ones competing to create a product—the best grant application—for the agency," said Gross. "That's not a particularly good system, though, because the funding agency doesn't want grant applications for their own sake. They want to fund research." In their paper, Bergstrom and Gross illustrate how the grant-application process is consistent with economic contest models. They show how funding a relatively small fraction of grant applications—such as the top 10 or 15 percent—makes the practice of science inefficient: The negative costs associated with trying to produce the best grant application could potentially outweigh the economic value of the science produced. If agencies funded a higher percentage of applications, professors could spend less time trying to write the perfect grant application. In addition, funding agencies wouldn't have to subjectively choose winners among high-quality proposals that are all based on sound science. But this option would require significantly expanding funding to agencies like the NIH and the NSF, a politically difficult task. Using the economic theory of contests, Gross and Bergstrom modeled a controversial alternative: awarding grants instead by partial lottery. Under a partial lottery system, funds are awarded by random draw among a pool of high-ranking grants—the top 40 percent, for example. Since applicants would be aiming to clear a lower bar for a smaller prize—a shot at the lottery instead of a guaranteed payout for winning proposals—the contest theory model predicts that applicants would spend less time trying to perfect their applications, Bergstrom said. Partial lotteries have been proposed by others, such as UW professor of laboratory medicine Ferric Fang and Johns Hopkins professor Arturo Casadevall. They're also used by two funding agencies in New Zealand and the Volkswagen Foundation. Gross and Bergstrom simply use contest theory to show how this system could also free professors from the seemingly endless cycle of grant applications. But partial lotteries aren't the only viable solution, they say. Funding agencies could also award grants based on merit, such as a professor's past record of excellence in research. But that system also would need mechanisms to help early-career faculty and professors from underrepresented groups obtain grants, Bergstrom said. Hybrid systems are another option, such as a partial lottery for early-career faculty and merit-based grants for later-career faculty. "There are many potential routes out of the current hole," said Bergstrom. "What doesn't change is our conclusion that the current grant-application system is fundamentally inefficient and unsustainable."

The "magic carpet" featured in tales from "One Thousand and One Nights" to Disney's "Aladdin" captures the imagination not only because it can fly, but because it can also wave, flap, and alter its shape to serve its riders. With that inspiration, and the assistance of catalytic chemical reactions in solutions, a team from the University of Pittsburgh's Swanson School of Engineering has designed a two-dimensional, shape-changing sheet that moves autonomously in a reactant-filled fluid. The article, "Designing self-propelled, chemically-active sheets: Wrappers, flappers and creepers," was published recently in the AAAS journal Science Advances. Principal investigator is Anna C. Balazs, the John A. Swanson Chair and Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the Swanson School. Lead author is Abhrajit Laskar, and co-author is Oleg E. Shklyaev, both post-doctoral associates. "It's long been a challenge in chemistry to create a non-living object that moves on its own within an environment, which in turn alters the object's shape, allowing it to carry out brand new tasks, like trapping other objects," Dr. Balazs explained. "Researchers previously have made chemically active patches on a surface that could generate fluid flow, but the flow didn't influence the location or shape of the patch. And in our own lab we've modeled spherical and rectangular particles that can move autonomously within a fluid-filled microchamber. But now we have this integrated system that utilizes a chemical reaction to activate the fluid motion that simultaneously transports a flexible object and "sculpts" its shape, and it all happens autonomously." The group accomplished this feat of self-propulsion and reconfiguration by introducing a coating of catalysts on the flexible sheet, which is roughly the width of a human hair. The addition of reactants to the surrounding fluid initiates both the carpet's motion and the changes of its form. "To best of our knowledge, this is the first time these catalytic chemical reactions have been applied to 2-D sheets to generate flows that transform these sheets into mobile, 3-D objects," Dr. Balazs said. Further, by placing different catalysts on specific areas of the sheet and controlling the amount and type of reactants in the fluid, the group created a useful cascade of catalytic reactions where one catalyst breaks down an associated chemical, which then becomes a reactant for the next of the set of catalytic reactions. Adding different reactants and designing appropriate configurations of the sheet allows for a variety of actions—in this study, enwrapping an object, making a flapping motion, and tumbling over obstacles on a surface. Examples of self-propelled, chemically active sheets. Credit: Abhrajit Laskar "A microfluidic device that contains these active sheets can now perform vital functions, such as shuttling cargo, grabbing a soft, delicate object, or even creeping along to clean a surface," Dr. Shklyaev said. "These flexible micro-machines simply convert chemical energy into spontaneous reconfiguration and movement, which enables them to accomplish a repertoire of useful jobs." Dr. Laskar added that if the sheet is cut into the shape of a four-petal flower and placed on the surface of a microfluidic device, the chemistry of the petals can be "programmed" to open and close individually, creating gates that perform logic operations, as well as generate particular fluid flows to transport particles throughout the device. "For example, like a catcher's mitt you can use the petals of the flower to trap a microscopic ball and hold it for a finite time, then initiate a new chemical reaction on a different set of petals so that the ball moves between them in a chemically-directed game of catch," Dr. Laskar explained. "This level of spatial and temporal control allows for staged reactions and analyses that you otherwise couldn't perform with non-deformable materials." The group also experimented with the placement of the catalyst on different parts of the sheet to create specific motions. In one experiment, placing the catalyst on just the body of the sheet, rather than the head and tail, triggered a creeping movement eerily similar to the movement of an inchworm. In another realization, when obstacles were placed in front of the coated sheet, it would tumble over the obstacle and continue moving, allowing it to traverse a bumpy terrain. "This research gives us further insight into how chemistry can drive autonomous, spontaneous actuation and locomotion in microfluidic devices," Dr. Balazs said. "Our next task is to explore microfabrication by using the interaction and self-organization of multiple sheets to bring them together into specific architectures designed to perform complex, coordinated functions. Also, by experimenting with different stimuli such as heat and light, we can design mobile, 3-D micro-machines that adapt their shape and action to changes in the environment. This level of responsive behavior is vital to creating the next generation of soft robotic devices."