Cow manure digester leaks offset their climate benefits

A new study shows that systems designed to capture methane from cow manure, called dairy digesters, are highly effective.

But on the rare occasions they fail, the leaks are large enough to offset their climate benefits.

“I think manure emissions on dairies are underestimated. These digesters seem to be a solution that captures a lot of methane,” says Alyssa Valdez, a University of California, Riverside climate scientist and lead study author. “But I wanted to make sure they were working properly.”

The findings of her study in Environmental Research Letters draw on eight years of satellite and airborne observations of 98 dairies across California. By tracking emissions before, during, and after digester installation, Valdez and her research team were able to see how these systems perform over time and at scale.

Digesters are widely seen as a key climate solution. By sealing manure ponds and capturing the gas they produce, these systems convert methane into usable fuel instead of allowing it to escape into the atmosphere where it has a tremendous effect on the climate.

Methane is shorter lived than carbon dioxide, but it is 80 times more powerful at trapping heat in the atmosphere, making even small releases significant.

A previous study led by UCR climate scientist Francesca Hopkins examined emissions at a single dairy using ground-based measurements. Hopkins found that a well-managed digester can cut methane emissions by as much as 80%. This new research builds on that work by showing how digesters perform across dozens of farms, including what happens when things go wrong.

Across the dairies studied, the number of strong methane plumes declined after digesters were installed, suggesting the systems are effective overall. However, the researchers also detected occasional leaks that were far more intense than emissions from traditional manure storage.

“For the most part, the digesters are working well,” Valdez says. “But the few leaks that happen, they make a huge impact.”

In some cases, the team observed methane escaping at rates around 1,000 kilograms per hour. By comparison, typical emissions from open manure lagoons ranged from 20 to 100 kilograms per hour.

The contrast highlights a central challenge: digesters concentrate methane in one place, making it easier to capture, but they also increase the risk of powerful releases if something goes wrong.

Those large releases are not limited to system failures. The study also captured spikes in emissions during digester construction and installation, a phase that is rarely measured but can produce substantial short-term increases.

To capture these patterns, the researchers relied on satellite and aircraft data. Satellite images allowed them to track changes across dozens of dairies over long periods, which is not possible with traditional ground-based monitoring. Aircraft measurements were then used to identify concentrated methane plumes over specific infrastructure locations, making the approach especially useful for spotting leaks.

“A farmer might not know their digester is leaking,” Valdez says. “This gives us a way to detect issues early and prevent them from becoming long-term problems.”

However, this method does not capture all emissions. It cannot measure more diffuse methane releases from sources such as lagoons or fields. For that reason, the researchers say satellite and airborne observations are most effective when combined with on-the-ground measurements, which provide a fuller picture.

This need for comprehensive monitoring comes as California continues to invest in digesters as part of its strategy to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases. Hundreds of these systems are already operating or in development across the state.

In some cases, methane releases are not accidental. Operators may vent gas when it cannot be flared due to air quality regulations or when systems require maintenance. These process-related emissions add another layer of complexity to managing digester performance.

Even so, the study shows that most systems are working well and that large leaks are relatively uncommon. But for Valdez, who spent years living in California’s Central Valley, and whose family lives there, the work is about ensuring that climate solutions deliver real benefits in a region critical to the nation’s food system.

“This region is the backbone of our food supply, but people there also carry a lot of fear about air quality,” she says. “And they have good reasons for that.”

More broadly, the study highlights the need to pay closer attention to agricultural waste.

“We need to start caring about poop,” Valdez says. “And we need to keep verifying that these solutions are actually working. If we monitor them carefully, we can make sure they deliver on their promise.”

Source: UC Riverside

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Could coral reefs hold the next big medicine?

Researchers have found that coral reefs are home to a vast array of previously unknown bioactive metabolites.

Bioactive metabolites are small biomolecules that have the potential to provide the basis for new drugs, and a host of other products.

“There’s a huge treasure trove of genomic potential,” says University of California, Santa Barbara marine biologist Rebecca Vega Thurber.

Thurber one of the scientists on the 2016-2018 Tara Pacific expedition, a two-year scientific exploration of the coral reefs of the Pacific Ocean. The expedition team studied 32 archipelagos and took a total of 58,000 samples; it was the first research voyage of this scale to examine these fragile ecosystems.

“The mission was to try to characterize the total biodiversity that existed on these pretty unexplored reefs and open water systems,” says Thurber, who directs UCSB’s Marine Science Institute and is a coauthor of a paper in the journal Nature.

The expedition’s research dove into various aspects of the coral reef microbiome—the many, diverse microorganisms that live in and around corals. Thurber’s team was especially interested in the bacteria associated with these reefs.

“In the past, a lot of people looked at bacteria associated with the water, and there’s a lot of really interesting biodiversity associated with the water bacteria, but no one had really taken a deep dive into coral-specific bacteria,” she says.

Taking a genomic approach, which characterizes organisms’ DNA, the researchers examined the bacteria found in two types of stony coral and one type of fire coral. The latter are actually colonial marine organisms more closely related to jellyfish than they are to their stony distant cousins.

The team reconstructed more than 13,000 metagenome-assembled microbial genomes from reef-building coral samples taken during the expedition.

“Ninety percent of what we found had never been found before,” Thurber says. “That’s a total of 3,700 new bacteria we discovered through this approach.”

Virtually all of the newly discovered bacteria were specific to their hosts, and not found in the water, she adds.

This discovery adds a wealth of possibilities for finding and synthesizing important products, using the bioactive molecules these bacteria produce as a result of their metabolisms. Small compounds the bacteria use to grow, communicate, defend themselves, and adapt could be converted for a variety of purposes, from medicine to industry.

“They can be used for drugs, or for industrial purposes,” she points out.

“They could be used in laundry detergents, or in the development of concrete, for example. If you’re developing new biotechnology materials, these biomolecules are really important for allowing scientists to create new synthetic products.”

Among the newly found bacteria they identified were new groups of Acidobacteriota, a ubiquitous and metabolically versatile group that encodes previously unknown enzymology, which could play a promising role in protein engineering.

Furthermore, the team found that the biosynthetic potential of reef-building coral microbiomes rivaled or surpassed that of sponges, a well-known and prolific source of bioactive metabolites. Sponges have been a primary focus for bioactive product discovery, Thurber explains, but corals had never really been explored in terms of their bioactive compounds.

And this is only scratching the surface—the researchers looked at just three species of coral out of hundreds.

“What could we discover if we looked at all corals?” she asks.

All of this potential, unfortunately, exists in fragile ecosystems at the front lines of ocean warming, which has already bleached many coral reef systems in the Pacific.

“It underscores the importance,” the researchers say, “of conserving coral reefs as vital reservoirs of molecular diversity.”

“Coral reefs are doing really badly right now,” Thurber says. “We really wanted a better understanding of what these creatures are capable of and what we could potentially be missing when they’re destroyed.”

Source: UC Santa Barbara

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Could chickens hatch more useful medical proteins in eggs?

A researcher is working to create chickens that hatch useful medical proteins.

Chicken eggs are already used to harvest helpful proteins called antibodies to protect humans from viruses such as influenza.

A new breakthrough at the University of Missouri could one day lead to chickens that produce other useful medical proteins in their eggs.

In a new study, Mizzou researchers solved a common issue in the field of avian genetics known as epigenetic silencing.

In the past, scientists have learned that if they insert a new gene into random places in a chicken’s DNA, the new gene may get “silenced” or turned off over time. Therefore, the chicken—and more importantly, its offspring—might either not inherit the benefit linked with the new gene or the benefit may diminish over time as the new gene gets passed down from generation to generation. That makes it difficult to create a stable line of genetically engineered chickens that produce useful medical proteins.

So, Mizzou scientists tried a new approach to avoid epigenetic silencing. Using the gene-editing tool CRISPR, researchers focused on a specific enzyme that plays a key role in glucose metabolism inside a chicken cell. They attached a marker that glows green, allowing them to easily see whether a gene stays turned on.

“This enzyme, GAPDH, is needed to break down sugar to make energy, so every cell needs it to survive,” Kiho Lee, a professor in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources and study author, says.

“Our hypothesis was that since this enzyme is active all the time, the gene segment we introduce into that location should stay on all the time.”

After multiple months and many rounds of cell division, the researchers were excited by what they saw in the chicken cells in Lee’s lab: the reporter genes were still glowing bright green, indicating that gene silencing never occurred.

The success of this proof-of-concept study paves the way to see whether Lee and his team can create a platform for developing a stable line of genetically modified chickens. They’re collaborating with scientists and industry partners to see which genetic modifications would be most helpful to various stakeholders.

“This work could ultimately support efforts to make a stable line of genetically engineered birds that lay many eggs, all of which will hopefully contain useful proteins that can be used in various clinical applications for human medicine,” Lee says.

“There could also be agricultural and economic implications of this work, too. With how devastating avian influenza is to birds, if a new gene segment that can mitigate transmission of the virus can be inserted into the chicken’s genome, we would want that new gene segment to stay on and get passed down from generation to generation.”

The research appears in Poultry Science.

The study was funded by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture in the United States Department of Agriculture.

Source: University of Missouri

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Potential losses motivate people more than potential wins

Athletes say they hate to lose more than they love to win. New research finds the same sentiment is shared in organizations.

A Virginia Tech researcher and his colleagues discovered that when managers frame work problems as a potential loss, employees are more likely to take action than when those problems are framed as potential gains.

The research also revealed that when the potential loss affects a larger group, employees are more likely to take action in the form of speaking up to a supervisor in hopes of finding a solution.

The findings appear in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

For managers, this research suggests that framing work problems as potential losses can influence employees to speak up more.

“Employee voice occurs when suggestions are made to improve organizational functioning,” says Phil Thompson, associate professor in the Pamplin College of Business management department.

“From an organizational perspective, the positive outcomes of employee voice include improved performance, effectiveness, and workplace safety. From an employee level, speaking up is positively related to creativity, innovation, engagement, and ethical behavior.”

At its core, this research shows that how managers choose to frame problems directly influences employees’ motivation to speak up at work. For managers, this is an insightful approach for building more open and collaborative teams.

“When managers say, ‘If we don’t get this done, not only will you lose the $5,000 bonus, but everybody in this work group is going to lose a $5,000 bonus,’ it magnifies an employee’s motivation to act in a proactive way,” says Thompson.

“This suggests that framing work problems as what will be collectively lost—compared to what can be individually lost—makes employees want to speak up more.”

Thompson was part of a research team led by Jeffery Thomas and Jonathan Booth from The London School of Economics and Mark Bolino from Oklahoma University. Together they analyzed responses from nearly 2,000 full-time employees, MBA students, and employee-supervisor pairs for their experience in situations where work problems were framed as either a gain or a loss. Across three different studies, framing something as a loss yielded employees to voice a work suggestion more.

For example, a manager dealing with a reputational crisis of their team, such as a product quality issue, can frame the problem in a way to spark helpful employee suggestions on how to resolve the issue.

For example, instead of saying “if this product has great quality, our company will look really good” a manager saying “if this product is not up to quality standards, our reputation will be damaged” carries more weight for the team. When this reputational risk is shared by everyone, employees are more willing to step forward to help the problem.

In the first study, participants were asked to think about a problem at work that was significant for them. From there, they were randomly assigned to write about the potential losses or gains from that problem. They were also asked to indicate how likely they were to talk about these problems to their supervisor. Participants who reflected on their potential losses showed a 16% higher willingness to speak up compared to those who focused on the potential gains.

When it came to the MBA students, they read a fictional performance review scenario where a workplace problem was described. They then rated how willing they would be to speak up about that scenario if they were in the situation. One example suggested that the entire team might fall short of its goals if an issue was not addressed. This specific scenario yielded the most likelihood of speaking up 35% more than the scenario’s suggesting that only they would miss their goal, supporting the research’s findings that an employee is more likely to speak up when the loss impacts more people.

The third study looked at employee-supervisor pairings to understand how these relationships play out in the real world. Using pairings from across three industries, employees reported a workplace problem they encountered and their supervisor rated how often that employee spoke up on the job. While the first two studies involved hypothetical scenarios, this real-world evidence showed that employees were 8-10 times more likely to speak up when issues were framed as a potential collective loss compared with a potential collective gain.

“This research is really geared toward managers so they can facilitate and understand how and why their employees will speak up,” says Thompson.

“You can talk about the issue, but it always ends in terms of how we frame things.”

Source: Virginia Tech

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Alzheimer’s screening may work differently for men and women

A new study shows standard cognitive screening tools used to monitor Alzheimer’s disease may not reflect underlying brain changes in the same way for women and men.

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, nearly two-thirds of Americans living with Alzheimer’s are women.

New Georgia State University research in the journal Brain Communications adds to growing evidence that Alzheimer’s may progress differently in men and women—and that those differences could matter in clinical care. It also suggests doctors may need to interpret common tests differently for each sex.

The issue may involve standard screening tools like the 30-point Mini-Mental State Examination, or MMSE. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is an intermediate stage between normal aging and Alzheimer’s disease—and this research suggests that, for women, a good MMSE score during that stage may not fully reflect underlying brain changes.

“A woman who scores well on the MMSE in the MCI stage may still be showing underlying brain changes that are not fully captured by that score alone,” says Mukesh Dhamala, the study’s senior author and a professor of physics and neuroscience at Georgia State University.

“Screening tools may need sex-calibrated interpretation.”

Dhamala notes that men and women are given the same test, with no adjustments for sex—a design limitation his research suggests may mask differences in how far the disease has progressed in the brain.

To understand why, the research team analyzed brain scans from 332 people at different stages of the disease. They found that Alzheimer’s affects men’s and women’s brains differently.

In men, the brain showed more shrinkage earlier in the disease’s progression, from normal cognitive health to mild cognitive impairment. In women, the brain showed steeper and more widespread decline from MCI to Alzheimer’s disease.

The findings suggest the brain may be compensating in women in ways that help maintain cognitive performance earlier in the disease. Their cognitive scores were tied to a broader range of brain regions than men’s, suggesting the brain may be recruiting additional areas to support performance.

That may help explain why structural brain changes and cognitive scores may not align in the same way for women and men.

The study was led by Chandrama Mukherjee, a doctoral student in Georgia State’s physics and astronomy department, under Dhamala’s guidance. The work lays a foundation for the next phase of research, including tracking patients over time and examining how hormones and genetics influence these differences.

“If this line of research succeeds, the larger impact would be a move away from a one-size-fits-all framework for Alzheimer’s disease,” Dhamala says.

“Diagnosis could become more sex-informed, biomarkers could be interpreted differently in men and women, and treatment trials could be designed with the understanding that disease timing and brain vulnerability may not be the same across sexes.”

Dhamala is clear that the findings are not yet a personal prescription.

Staying mentally and physically active, managing vascular health, and discussing family history or genetic risk with a doctor remain among the best evidence-based steps. But he believes the research should help shape an important conversation many women are having with their doctors right now.

“The long-term hope is that findings like ours will lead to sex-specific screening windows and earlier, more precise interventions,” he says.

For women, Dhamala believes that window may eventually open earlier than is currently recognized.

“In women, this may eventually help identify more targeted windows for intervention, including midlife and postmenopausal stages when neuroprotective hormonal changes may be especially relevant,” he says.

The research appears in Brain Communications.

Source: Georgia State University

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Team cracks 100 year-old rubber mystery

Scientists have solved a decades-old mystery behind reinforced rubber—a material used in everything from tires to industrial systems.

Every time you drive, board a plane or water your lawn, you’re relying on a material that has quietly powered modern life for nearly a century—reinforced rubber.

It’s in car and aircraft tires, industrial seals, medical devices, and countless everyday products. Yet despite its ubiquity and its central role in the $260 billion global tire industry, scientists have never fully understood why it works so well.

Until now.

A research team led by University of South Florida College of Engineering Professor David Simmons solved one of the oldest mysteries in materials science: How adding tiny particles known as carbon black transforms soft, stretchy rubber into something strong enough to support the weight of a fully loaded jet.

Their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provide an answer and offer a new way of thinking about how to design safer, longer-lasting materials.

“How is it that we’ve been using this for 80, 90, 100 years and haven’t really known how it works?” Simmons says.

“It’s been through enormous trial and error. The tire companies can purchase many different grades of carbon black—basically fancy soot—and they just have to use trial and error to figure out what’s worth paying more for and what isn’t.”

Now, after running 1,500 molecular dynamics simulations totaling about 15 years of computing time, the researchers unified competing theories and revealed the true mechanism—a phenomenon called Poisson’s ratio mismatch, which forces rubber to fight against its own incompressibility.

The basic recipe for reinforced rubber has changed little over the past century. Add microscopic particles—usually carbon black—to rubber, and the material becomes dramatically tougher and more durable. That’s why tires are black and can endure years of wear, heat, and repeated stress without falling apart.

But the reasons behind that transformation remained elusive for scientists, sparking “a major debate for multiple decades now,” Simmons says.

Some suggested the particles formed chain-like networks inside the rubber. Others argued the particles acted like glue, stiffening the material around them. Still others thought the particles simply took up space, forcing the rubber to stretch more.

Each theory failed to capture the full picture.

Instead of attempting to observe the various processes directly, something nearly impossible because of their nanoscale size, Simmons and his team recreated them virtually.

Simmons, together with USF postdoctoral scholar Pierre Kawak and doctoral student Harshad Bhapkar, used advanced molecular simulations to model how hundreds of thousands of atoms interact inside reinforced rubber.

By refining existing models to better reflect the real structure of carbon black and how it disperses inside rubber, they zeroed in on the material in ways experiments can’t.

“It’s not that we literally had a simulation running for 15 years,” Simmons says. “What it means is if you ran a calculation using your laptop for one hour and it used up the whole laptop with six cores, it would be six computing hours. We used USF’s large computing cluster with many, many cores for many months.”

The breakthrough centered around Poisson’s ratio, which measures how materials change shape when stretched.

Simmons compares it to pulling back the plunger of a sealed, water-filled syringe. Water doesn’t compress easily, so the harder you pull the more resistance you feel.

Rubber likewise strongly resists changes in volume. Stretching a normal rubber band makes it thinner as it lengthens, keeping its volume largely unchanged.

But when carbon black particles are added to rubber, they act like tiny supports, preventing it from thinning as much as it normally would. When the material is stretched, it’s forced to increase in volume, something it strongly resists.

In essence, the rubber “fights against itself,” producing a dramatic increase in stiffness and strength.

Notably, the findings don’t discard earlier theories. They unify them.

The team found that previously proposed mechanisms—including particle networks, sticky interactions, and space-filling effects—contribute to volume-resistance behavior. Rather than competing explanations, they are pieces of a larger puzzle.

By integrating them into a single framework, the researchers created the first comprehensive explanation of rubber reinforcement.

The breakthrough came after initial models fell short. When the simulations didn’t match real-world data, the team incorporated ideas from earlier scientific literature into their approach. The result was a model that aligned with the observed behavior.

For the tire industry and consumers, the findings are potentially transformative.

The “Magic Triangle” of tire design aims to improve fuel efficiency, traction, and durability at the same time, a near-impossible balancing act. Enhancing one or two outcomes often comes at the expense of the third.

Until now, manufacturers relied on trial and error to navigate those trade-offs, an expensive and time-consuming process.

With a better understanding of how reinforced rubber actually works, engineers can begin to design materials more precisely. The result could be tires that last longer, grip better in wet conditions, and improve fuel economy—all at once.

“The struggle always is to get more than two of the three to be good, and this is where trial and error only gets you so far,” Simmons says. “With these findings, we’re laying a new foundation for rationally designing tires.”

The impact extends beyond tires, since reinforced rubber is used in critical infrastructure ranging from power plants to aerospace systems. Past failures in the materials have sometimes been catastrophic, including the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986.

“If you remember, the reason the Challenger failed was a rubber gasket that got too cold,” Simmons says.

“A lot of energy systems, power plants have rubber parts. Everybody’s had a garden hose that started leaking because a rubber gasket failed. Now imagine that happening in a power plant or a chemical plant.”

This research was supported by the US Department of Energy Office of Science.

Source: University of South Florida

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Lunar dust could help build stuff on the moon

New research turns lunar dust into building blocks for future infrastructure on the moon.

As space agencies and private companies look toward sustained human presence on the moon, a fundamental challenge centers on how to build strong, durable infrastructure without hauling every material from Earth.

The new research from Rice University points to an unexpected solution—transforming one of the moon’s most stubborn obstacles, its abrasive dust, into a valuable building resource.

Led by Denizhan Yavas, assistant teaching professor of mechanical engineering at Rice, in collaboration with Ashraf Bastawros of Iowa State University, the study demonstrates that lunar regolith simulant, a terrestrial stand-in for the moon’s fine, abrasive dust, can be used to strengthen advanced composite materials.

The work appears in Advanced Engineering Materials.

“This work started with a simple but powerful question,” Yavas says. “Lunar dust is typically viewed as a major obstacle for exploration because of how abrasive and pervasive it is. We asked whether that same material could instead be used as a resource—something that could actually improve the performance of structural materials.”

The researchers explored how lunar regolith simulant could be incorporated into fiber-reinforced polymer composites, a class of lightweight materials already widely used in aerospace and high-performance engineering applications. By integrating the simulant as a reinforcing phase, they found measurable improvements in strength, toughness, and resistance to damage with performance increases of up to 30-40%.

“Our results show that you can take a material that is inherently challenging and convert it into something structurally beneficial,” Yavas says. “That shift in perspective is critical for building sustainably beyond Earth and enabling long-term exploration.”

The idea emerged from earlier work focused on developing nanoscale polymer surfaces designed to repel lunar dust. As the team worked to mitigate the hazards posed by the material, a broader opportunity came into focus.

“Instead of only trying to keep lunar dust away, we began to think about how to use it,” Yavas says. “That led us to this concept of embedding it directly into composite systems as reinforcement.”

The implications extend beyond laboratory testing. Lightweight, high-performance composites reinforced with lunar material could play a key role in constructing habitats, protective barriers and other infrastructure needed for sustained human presence on the moon.

The researchers emphasize the importance of reducing dependence on Earth-supplied materials, noting that one of the biggest constraints in space exploration is the cost and logistics of transporting them. If engineers could utilize what is already available on the lunar surface, it greatly increases the feasibility of longer missions and infrastructure development.

“Our long-term vision is to design materials that are not only high performing but also deeply integrated with the environment in which they are built,” Yavas says.

“For the moon, that means leveraging lunar regolith as much as possible to create resilient, scalable infrastructure.”

Source: Rice University

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