Special vertebrae keep diving seabirds from breaking their necks

Reinforced vertebrae allow plunge-diving seabirds to survive high-speed impacts, according to a new study.

A northern gannet scans the sea for fish from 100 feet in the air. Upon seeing a school, it pitches its body into a nosedive, somehow breaking the surface at 70 miles per hour without breaking its neck. This daring maneuver seems to defy the laws of nature, but it’s standard hunting behavior for plunge-diving seabirds.

The University of Washington study in the Anatomical Record shows that gannets and boobies have unique morphological adaptations that allow them to survive impact. Several of their neck vertebrae are joined by an additional contact surface that helps stabilize the cervical column. The overall shape of the vertebrae is also stockier than other birds.

“We wanted to figure out what makes gannets so special, so good at diving, and looking at their biology helped us understand how they can survive these impacts,” says senior author Bart Boom, a postdoctoral scholar at the UW’s Friday Harbor Labs.

The ecological record shows repeated instances in which birds develop physical traits in response to their environment. Charles Darwin was among the first to record this in in the 1830s—in finches on the Galápagos Islands—and researchers are still discovering new examples today. The connection between beak shape and foraging behavior is well documented, but the link between neck structure and feeding has received less attention.

The researchers began studying the mechanics of plunge-diving years ago. Gannets are built to withstand immense pressure on the head and neck that compresses the cervical column. Engineers typically favor short and fat structures for things built to tolerate compressive force, but these birds have long, slender necks with segmented vertebrae.

Gannet necks have 15 stacked vertebrae that bend slightly in an s-curve. Previous studies have shown that the muscles surrounding their vertebrae help lock them in place to prepare for impact, but few studies have looked at the actual morphology of diving birds’ necks.

To do so, the researchers collected specimens of diving birds and non-diving birds from the Burke Museum. The team performed CT scans to create detailed three-dimensional models of the cervical vertebrae and then analyzed the images with geometric morphometrics, a statistical method for studying biological samples that establishes landmarks for comparison. They considered the forces associated with various feeding styles and chose birds that represented a spectrum, pulling in additional morphological data from previous studies.

“Birds that rotate their heads side to side, or move them front to back, separate out from birds that use their heads in compression,” says lead author Megan Vanderberg, a graduate student of biology at UW’s Friday Harbor Labs. “We see that the birds that plunge-dive have more robust vertebrae. They’re thicker, wider, and also shorter, shaped more like a square.”

The stocky shape of the vertebrae provides added support, as does the additional contact surface, called an articular facet, in second through the sixth vertebrae. In this case, researchers think the extra facet keeps the birds’ necks from bending backward when they hit the water at an angle. Instead, the load gets transferred down the cervical column.

The researchers also observed more blocklike vertebrae in other diving birds, such as the kingfisher, but did not detect the extra facet. Kingfishers belong to a different avian family and are much smaller than gannets and boobies, but their necks seem to have evolved in a similar way. The structural relationship is also proportional: the larger the neck, the larger the vertebrae.

Kingfishers and the bigger plunge-divers also experience the same amount of force per neck area during a dive. Although total force scales with neck size, the amount of stress on the tissue is the same. Both groups experienced peak force nearly five milliseconds after impact despite the size difference.

Moving forward, the researchers hope to explore how force transfers down the neck in more detail. They also think this link between structure and function could help paleontologists identify plunge-diving birds from fossils.

“It feels like something I didn’t previously think about and probably overlooked before,” Vanderberg says. “I’m curious to start looking more closely at vertebrae in general, not just in birds.”

Additional coauthors are from UW and the University of California, Riverside.

This research was funded by the US National Science Foundation, Beatrice and Samuel A. Seaver Foundation, Friday Harbor Laboratories Research Endowment Fellowship, University of Washington Friday Harbor Laboratories Award, and Jim and Camille Uhlir.

Source: University of Washington

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Strong reading skills may help teens spot misinformation online

Students with stronger reading skills are better able to spot misinformation online—and those skills may be especially important for teenagers from disadvantaged backgrounds, according to a new study.

“Reading skills matter most for disadvantaged students,” says Jason Jabbari, an assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis and coauthor of the study. “The misinformation resistance gap between rich and poor students is largest among weaker readers and shrinks considerably among strong readers.”

The study appears in the journal Social Science Research.

It analyzed data from 232,901 teenagers in 49 countries who participated in the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment. Jabbari and his coauthor, Mobarak Hossain of the London School of Economics and Political Science, looked at how students evaluate and share online information, including whether they check accuracy, compare sources, and share information they know to be false.

The study suggests that reading skills may help narrow socioeconomic gaps in students’ ability to resist misinformation, Jabbari says.

Students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds were generally better at resisting misinformation than their lower-socioeconomic-status peers. But the link between reading achievement and misinformation resistance was strongest among disadvantaged students.

Stronger reading skills gave students with fewer resources a greater advantage, the study found.

“Reading skills could play a compensatory role here,” Jabbari says. “Students from more advantaged families often have other supports, like parents who discuss the news, access to credible sources and norms that encourage skepticism, while lower-income students may be less likely to have those supports and may face increased exposure to misinformation. As a result, the ability to comprehend, compare, and evaluate texts may carry more weight for low-income students.”

The study suggests that strengthening literacy skills could be an important way to reduce misinformation and its unequal effects, Jabbari says.

The study also shows how difficult it can be for teenagers to navigate misinformation, even when they report using some basic verification strategies.

Nearly one-third of students in the study says they had shared made-up information without flagging it as such. Many students reported comparing sources or checking information, but those habits didn’t always prevent them from sharing misinformation.

“We looked at how roughly hundreds of thousands of students handle information online, such as whether they compare sources, check accuracy before sharing, or pass along things they know are made up,” Jabbari says. “Most students report some basic checking habits, but many still trust what they read or share unverified content.”

Jabbari says teenagers’ online behavior is shaped not only by their ability to evaluate information, but also by their social environment.

The findings point to schools as an important place to help students navigate misinformation.

“First, building reading comprehension itself matters, especially for lower-income students, who appear to benefit most from stronger reading skills,” Jabbari says.

He also points to explicit strategies such as lateral reading, in which students leave a website and consult other sources rather than judging a page’s credibility by its appearance. Other approaches include “prebunking,” game-based interventions and prompts that encourage people to consider accuracy before sharing information.

Fifteen-year-olds are a particularly important group to reach, Jabbari says, because they are increasingly navigating online information independently while still being accessible through schools.

“This means we can still reach nearly all of them through classroom instruction before they enter adulthood and begin major milestones, like voting,” he says.

Source: Washington University in St. Louis

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How do heart valves last so long?

A new study offers insights into how heart valves last so long.

Collagen plays a critical role in keeping heart valves strong, but the heart is surrounded by enzymes designed to break down collagen. So how can heart valves function efficiently decade after decade?

The new study shows that the biomechanical tension applied to these valves every time your heart beats plays a key role in protecting the collagen from breaking down.

“We know that collagen is critical for keeping heart valves strong, and that the leaflets in a heart valve open and close millions of times every year,” says Hsiao-Ying Shadow Huang, first author of a paper on the work and an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University.

“We also know that the fluid surrounding the heart contains collagenases that are designed to break that collagen down. Yet those leaflets remain sturdy for decades.

“We also know that when people develop heart disease, the structural integrity of those leaflets can degrade very quickly. We wanted to explore why these things happen, and what role—if any—biomechanics might play in these processes.”

Leaflets are the flaps of tissue in a heart valve that open to allow blood to be pumped in one direction, then shut to prevent that blood from flowing back.

For this study, the researchers conducted experiments using pig hearts. The researchers tested different levels of strain on heart valve leaflets, pulled the tissue in different directions, and varied the levels of collagenase in the fluid surrounding the hearts.

“When a healthy heart pumps, and the aorta valve leaflet is in the open position, the leaflet is stretched to 70% of its maximum capacity lengthwise, but to only 20% of its maximum capacity laterally,” says Huang.

“We tested the leaflets under those conditions, but also looked at other levels of strain that retained that same 70% to 20% ratio, such as 35% to 10%. We also tried changing the ratio so that the leaflets experienced the same amount of strain in both directions. And we conducted these experiments with both normal levels of collagenase and elevated levels of collagenase.”

After each experiment, the researchers evaluated the microstructure of the leaflet tissue to see if the tissue was intact or had been damaged.

“We found that increasing the strain did not damage the collagen, even with higher levels of collagenases—as long as the ratio of the lengthwise strain and lateral strain stayed the same,” says Huang. “When we changed the strain ratio, the collagen broke down—regardless of the collagenase levels.”

In other words, stretching the leaflet in the same direction as the collagen-rich fibers serves as a biomechanical protective mechanism, as long as the naturally-occurring strain ratio is preserved.

“Previous studies have identified this protective mechanism in collagen-rich tissues in tendons, but that research only pulled the tissue in one direction,” says Huang. “Heart valve leaflets experience strain in more than direction every time they open and close, so this finding is a step forward.

“Our findings also offer insights into why leaflets degrade so quickly when heart disease alters the amount of strain the leaflets are subjected to—they’ve lost that biomechanical defense mechanism,” says Huang.

“These findings advance our understanding of how the heart works, how it fails, and how we can engineer new biomaterials for use in heart valve replacements.”

The paper appears in the Journal of Biomechanical Engineering.

Source: North Carolina State University

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The universe may be stuck in place

A new study suggests the universe may be trapped in its own comfort zone—and why that is a good thing.

The new research suggests the universe could be locked into its current state by the same kinds of quantum effects that scientists study when trying to preserve fragile information inside a quantum computer.

The paper appears in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

The research addresses a long-standing worry among physicists: that the universe could be sitting in what is known as a false vacuum, a state that looks stable but is not actually the lowest-energy configuration available to it. Quantum mechanics allows a field to tunnel out of such a state without warning, a shift that could alter the fundamental properties of the cosmos.

That concern is not purely theoretical. Some calculations indicate the Higgs field, which helps give particles like electrons their mass, may itself be resting in a false vacuum rather than in nature’s true lowest-energy state. If it ever tunneled to a deeper state, the properties of particles and forces throughout the universe could change.

The new study finds a mechanism that makes such a transition far less likely. The researchers modeled how a quantum field behaves when it interacts with its surroundings during the rapid expansion of the early universe. They found that those interactions can strongly suppress tunneling, effectively trapping the field in whatever state it has already settled into. The team calls this effect “cosmic lockdown.”

The underlying physics comes from a field called open quantum systems, which studies how quantum systems change when they interact with an environment rather than existing in isolation. The same ideas are central to quantum computing, where even minor outside interference can disrupt a quantum system’s behavior. The researchers combined those techniques with numerical simulations of a quantum field evolving in an expanding universe.

In simple terms, the interactions carry information about the field out into its surroundings. Once that information is effectively lost track of, interference between two possible outcomes fades in a process called decoherence. In the regime the team studied, that loss of interference can also suppress the field’s ability to tunnel at all, a variation of what physicists call the quantum Zeno effect, in which persistent monitoring of a system inhibits its transitions.

The researchers describe two distinct stages in the process. Early on, as the universe expands, a field’s ability to keep pace with that expansion largely determines which of two possible energy states it ends up favoring. Heavier fields tend to settle toward the lowest-energy option, while lighter fields can end up more evenly split between the two. Later, decoherence from the environment helps lock in whichever outcome already occurred.

The authors caution that the result does not prove the universe’s current state will remain stable forever or determine the specific likelihood that the Higgs field will eventually decay. Confirming that would require accounting for additional factors, including a changing cosmic expansion rate and the field’s own influence on gravity.

Still, the team frames the work as a bridge between quantum information science and cosmology, applying tools originally developed for quantum computers to a question about the history and long-term fate of the universe itself.

The study was written by Gregory Kaplanek, a Syracuse University postdoctoral researcher working in the lab of Jason Pollack, an assistant professor in the electrical engineering and computer science department, along with four collaborators: Robson Christie and Jaewoo Joo of the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, Vincent Vennin of the Laboratoire de Physique de l’Ecole Normale Superieure in France, and David Wands, also of Portsmouth. Kaplanek and Pollack are part of Syracuse University’s Institute for Quantum and Information Sciences.

Source: Syracuse University

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How chronic intestinal inflammation can affect the heart

Chronic intestinal inflammation can affect the heart through changes in gut microbiota and immune cells, a new study finds.

The findings suggests a potential therapeutic target for reducing cardiovascular risk in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

The findings in the journal Circulation Research demonstrated that chronic colitis (inflammation of the colon)-associated gut microbiota dysbiosis (an imbalance in the different microorganisms living together in a microbiome) causally contributes to cardiac hypertrophy and cardiac dysfunction by driving systemic immune cell metabolic and mitochondrial reprogramming in mice.

Mitochondria are cell organelles that generate most of the chemical energy needed to power the cell’s biochemical reactions.

Cardiovascular disease is a leading cause of global morbidity and mortality. People with IBD, which includes chronic inflammatory conditions of the digestive tract, have an increased risk of cardiovascular complications. IBD is also associated with changes in the gut microbiota, the community of microorganisms that normally lives in the intestine. However, exactly how these changes in the gut contribute to heart problems has remained unclear.

In this study, the researchers used a chronic colitis mouse model to assess gut microbiota dysbiosis, systemic immune cell metabolism and cardiac remodeling. Transferring gut microbiota from mice with colitis to healthy mice was sufficient to alter immune cell metabolism and promote cardiac abnormalities, providing evidence that changes in gut microbes can contribute to the effects of intestinal inflammation on the heart.

Furthermore, the researchers identified a bacterial component called lipopolysaccharide, or LPS, as an important link between the gut and heart. LPS is produced by certain types of gut bacteria and can enter the circulation when the intestinal environment is disrupted. The study found that increased LPS stimulates immune cells to produce a protein called GBP1, leading to changes in these cells that promote their recruitment to the heart.

“Our study provides evidence that chronic intestinal inflammation can affect the heart through changes in the gut microbiota and immune cells,” says Jun Zou, an assistant professor in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University.

“We found that bacterial signals from the gut can alter immune cells in ways that promote their movement into the heart, where they can contribute to abnormal heart enlargement and impaired function.”

The study also revealed another way GBP1 may affect the heart. During colitis, GBP1 was increased in exosomes, tiny packages released by cells that circulate in the body and carry biological signals between cells. The researchers found that these GBP1-containing exosomes could be taken up by heart cells and contribute to their enlargement.

“This work may also have broader implications for infection-associated cardiac injury, as many pathogens strongly induce GBP family proteins,” says Ye Ding, co-senior author of the study and a research assistant professor in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State.

“While GBP1 plays essential antimicrobial roles during infection, excessive or dysregulated GBP1 activation may inadvertently contribute to cardiac dysfunction.”

The study was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health.

Source: Georgia State University

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Why is ADHD having a moment on social media?

October is ADHD Awareness Month, and the disorder has rarely been more visible—or more discussed—online.

Kevin Antshel, professor of psychology at Syracuse University and director of the PhD Program in Clinical Psychology, studies how ADHD is diagnosed, treated, and understood across the lifespan, including how it overlaps with conditions like anxiety, autism, and learning disorders.

Here, Antshel shared his perspective on why ADHD is getting more attention now, what still gets lost in the conversation, and what to know if you or someone you love has been newly diagnosed:

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Eggshells help make stronger, lighter metal alloys

Researchers have demonstrated a technique that uses powdered eggshells to produce high-quality magnesium alloys.

These alloys have a wide variety of automotive, aerospace, and biomedical applications.

The eggshells are used as a low-cost, environmentally sustainable alternative to conventional calcium materials, which are manufactured from ore using an energy-intensive process.

Calcium materials, such as calcium carbonate and calcium oxide, are used in a wide variety of applications.

“For example, calcium carbonate and calcium oxide are important materials for manufacturing metal alloys,” says Bharat Gwalani, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at North Carolina State University.

“But producing those calcium materials relies on a complex process making use of mined materials. We’ve demonstrated a technique that allows us to skip a step. Rather than processing ore to make calcium materials and then using those materials to produce metals or metal alloys, we’ve shown that you can produce a high-quality metal alloy using eggshells.”

Eggshells are 95% calcium carbonate, and the process the researchers use to incorporate the eggshell into alloys converts it into calcium oxide and nascent calcium.

“There are many benefits to this,” Gwalani says. “There are fewer steps. You have a reliable, sustainable supply chain. Eggshells are inexpensive. And you use far less energy, because you do not have to go through the process of creating calcium products from ore.”

For this proof-of-concept work, the researchers used eggshells to produce stronger, harder magnesium alloys, which have a combination of strength and weight that makes them useful for things like electronics and aerospace equipment.

“Calcium is added to magnesium to improve its mechanical properties,” says Gwalani. “We wanted to see if we could use biogenic waste—eggshells—to produce the necessary calcium materials during the manufacturing process.”

For this process, the researchers begin by drilling a series of evenly spaced holes into a cylindrical block of magnesium. Those holes are then filled with finely ground eggshells. This block is then placed into a steel cylinder. A steel mandrel with a hole in the center is then lowered into the cylinder. The mandrel essentially serves as a pestle in a mortar, pressing down on the magnesium block and spinning at 300 rotations per minute.

This process is called friction stir extrusion. As the mandrel presses down and spins, several things happen at about the same time. The eggshell powder is mixed into the surrounding magnesium, creating friction between the particles of eggshell and the metal. This friction converts the calcium carbonate into calcium oxide and calcium—and produces the high-strength alloy Mg2Ca. Lastly, the downward pressure of the mandrel forces the magnesium alloy out through the hole, producing an extruded rod of the finished product.

“This work shows that you can produce high-value, high-quality magnesium alloys using an inexpensive, sustainable, biogenic waste material,” says Gwalani. “This is a scalable, energy-efficient, and environmentally responsible way to produce magnesium-based composites using biogenic waste materials.

“And we’ve already demonstrated that this approach has applications beyond magnesium and eggshells,” Gwalani says. “We demonstrated earlier this year that you can use the same approach—friction stir extrusion—to produce magnetic composites by grinding magnetic samarium-cobalt (SmCo5) powder into scrap aluminum.”

The paper appears in the Journal of Magnesium and Alloys.

Additional coauthors of the paper are from NC State, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the City University of Hong Kong, and the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.

This work was done with support from the Office of Naval Research Global and from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Source: North Carolina State University

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