This week’s Science Round-up includes an article on how citizen science is helping address how crops will behave in the face of climate change. I love that kind of article — and the whole concept of citizen science. You don’t have to be a PhD in an obscure specialty to make a genuine contribution to a field. Your experience, your knowledge, or a simple willingness to participate can help drive breakthroughs that might never have been achieved without your help. Really. Citizen science has discovered planets and tracked comets. It’s traced the path of disease and identified threats to species around the world. It’s a critical factor in related numbers in climate models into real-world events. All of which are really good reasons to get involved.
I’ve mentioned Zooniverse several times before, and I want to make it a much more regular feature of the weekly science reporting. The great thing about Zooniverse is that not only can you make a contribution to important research, you rarely need to bring anything but a healthy curiosity and a willingness to try. Zooniverse projects are structured in a way that doesn’t punish you for trying, and they don’t force you to spend a lot of time warming up before joining in. What you’re contributing is your reasoning ability—something very difficult for any algorithm to match. Participants on Zooniverse have not helped identify new species and discovered asteroids, they’ve transcribed the diaries of black soldiers in the civil war and discovered secrets hidden among the thousands of ancient parchments recovered from a Medieval Jewish “geniza.” I’ve personally been one of those who spotted a new planet in data in data from a NASA satellite, and I’ve gotten to name a wild chimp I spotted using a stone to smash nuts while scanning through footage from hidden cameras in Africa.
Here are just a couple of the most recent projects:
Help biologists and astronomers build a system that uses space techniques, to identify endangered animals by their heat.
In thermal data animals glow brightly because of their body heat - and because they are warmer than their surroundings they really stand out. This glow is the same type of glow that stars and galaxies have out in the Universe. This means that we can use methods from astronomy to find the animals and poachers and tell them apart automatically.
Help identify surface features on Mars
Not just dunes and valleys, but “spiders” and “Swiss cheese terrain.” Martian features are wild. And you can be among the first to map them.
Health
Nature: Monthly injections could replace daily pill regime for HIV treatment
Amy Maxmen
Long-acting medicines have proved as effective as daily pills in preventing HIV from replicating, according to results from twin trials that enrolled more than 1,000 people in 16 countries.
The drugs tested, cabotegravir and rilpivirine, are given once a month as an injection. They are the first of several long-acting antiretroviral HIV medicines in development, which researchers hope will tackle one of the toughest challenges in the fight against HIV: how to ensure that people consistently take the drugs that can prevent the virus from replicating in their cells. Skipped doses put people with HIV, and their sexual partners, at risk.
The current daily pill treatments have been a godsend, and have made a huge change in the lives of millions. But those pills can have significant side effects. They can also be difficult to remember, difficult to afford, and simply a pain-in-the-@#$ to take. For those living in remote areas without easy access to a pharmacy, the pill regime can be just plain impossible. Monthly injections could not only be more convenient, but life saving for people around the globe.
Climate change
PNAS: Citizen science helps predict how crops will respond to climate change
Jacob van Etten, et. al.
Climate adaptation requires farmers to adjust their crop varieties over time and use the right varieties to minimize climate risk. Generating variety recommendations for farmers working in marginal, heterogeneous environments requires variety evaluation under farm conditions. On-farm evaluation is difficult to scale with conventional methods. We used a scalable approach to on-farm participatory variety evaluation using crowdsourced citizen science, assigning small experimental tasks to many volunteering farmers. We generated a unique dataset from 12,409 trial plots in Nicaragua, Ethiopia, and India, a participatory variety evaluation dataset of large size and scope. We show the potential of crowdsourced citizen science to generate insights into variety adaptation, recommend adapted varieties, and help smallholder farmers respond to climate change.
In this case, citizen scientists got a chance to really “get their hands dirty” in a satisfying way. The resulting experiments not only gave them immediate feedback in the food and knowledge.
Technology
Nature: UK policy on AI in healthcare could be the world standard—but isn’t enough
Melanie Smallman
The principles, laid out by the Department of Health and Social Care, aim to protect patient data and “ensure that only the best and safest data-driven technologies are used”. The projects that the code covers include efforts by Alphabet-backed AI company DeepMind, which has been working with London’s Moorfields Eye Hospital to crunch through more than one million eye scans to design an algorithm that could detect macular degeneration, and a partnership between Ultromics and John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, UK, that is using AI to improve early detection of heart disease and lung cancer.
The concern here is that the limits, while well-intended, are based off of how drug trials are managed, which isn’t a good model for AI applications.
The impact of AI is more akin to that of automobiles or personal computers than of medicine. Medicines are prescribed to patients, their use tied to individual need. But cars have shaped all our lives, cities and industries — even for individuals who do not drive. Policy around innovation and technology largely neglects tech’s potential to worsen inequalities, even as examples mount. Political scientist Virginia Eubanks of the University at Albany, State University of New York, coined the phrase ‘digital poorhouse’ to describe the effects of AI and automation on low-income households and communities
Even some uses of AI — like programs trying to match homeless and shelters — can require poor people to provide private data that makes them vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. And that same data can be, and has been, turned against poor communities and individuals.
UCI News: DNA data can be stolen by listening to a synthesizer
During the DNA synthesis process in a laboratory, recordings can be made of the subtle, telltale noises made by synthesis machines. And those captured sounds can be used to reverse-engineer valuable, custom-designed genetic materials used in pharmaceuticals, agriculture and other bioengineering fields.
Researchers from the University of California, Irvine and the University of California, Riverside have uncovered the possibility of an acoustic side-channel attack on the DNA synthesis process, a vulnerability that could present a serious risk to biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies and academic research institutions.
This may seem like going a long way to lift a lot of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs. But DNA sequences have real value in the biotechnology market. Industrial spies (and spies of the more traditional sort) have long made use of tools that allow them to listen in on rooms by pointing a laser at windows, so it may not even be necessary to be close by to swipe the “formula” for someone’s DNA.
Sustainability Science
Nocamels.com: Israeli researchers create sustainable plastics from seaweed-eaters
Klara Strube
Scientists at Tel Aviv University say the bioplastics polymer they developed derives from microorganisms that feed on seaweed, making it biodegradable, with zero toxic waste and completely recyclable. Their research was published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal “Bioresource Technology” in December.
The invention was part of a multidisciplinary collaboration that started a year ago at Tel Aviv University between Dr. Alexander Golberg of TAU’s Porter School of Environmental and Earth Sciences and Professor Michael Gozin of TAU’s School of Chemistry. The research was supported by Supratim Ghosh, a postdoctoral fellow who had recently joined the team from India.
The polymer comes from a protein created by the bacteria Haloferax mediterranei, which thrives on seaweed in saltwater. Supposedly the resulting bioplastic is easily shaped and flexible (in other words … plastic) in the short term, but breaks down biologically. It can also supposedly be eaten. Bioplastics are a growing field and a diverse set of products have been developed, but they have yet to make big strides into the market simply because plain old petroleum-based plastic is so cheap and there are few regulations on its use.
Inside Climate News: On why plastics are becoming “the new coal” in Appalachia
James Bruggers
With little notice nationally, a new petrochemical and plastics manufacturing hub may be taking shape along 300 miles of the upper reaches of the Ohio River, from outside Pittsburgh southwest to Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky. It would be fueled by a natural gas boom brought on by more than a decade of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a drilling process that has already dramatically altered the nation's energy landscape—and helped cripple coal.
But there's a climate price to be paid. Planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from the Shell plant alone would more or less wipe out all the reductions in carbon dioxide that Pittsburgh, just 25 miles away, is planning to achieve by 2030. Drilling for natural gas leaks methane, a potent climate pollutant; and oil consumption for petrochemicals and plastics may account for half the global growth in petroleum demand between now and 2050.
Naturally, the Trump EPA is encouraging this by promoting plastic use and pulling back regulation. Because with coal going downhill, there’s not much opportunity to screw the world up that way, and they have to find a way.
Materials Science
Ars Technica: Knitting involves complex math, and secrets for making better materials
Jennier Ouellette
Knitted fabrics like a scarf or socks are highly elastic, capable of stretching as much as twice their length, but individual strands of yarn hardly stretch at all. It's the way those strands form an interlocking network of stitches that give knitted fabrics their stretchiness. Physicists are trying to unlock the knitting "code"—the underlying mathematical rules that govern how different stitch combinations give rise to different properties like stretchiness—in hopes of creating new "tunable" materials whose properties can be tailored for specific purposes.
"Knitting is this incredibly complex way of converting one-dimensional yarn into complex fabric," said Elisabetta Matsumoto, a physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "So basically this is a type of coding." Figuring out how different stitch types determine shape and mechanical strength could help create designer materials for future technologies—everything from better materials for the aerospace industry to stretchable materials to replace torn ligaments. The models her team is developing may also be useful in improving the realistic animation of clothing and hair in video game graphics. Matsumoto described her research during the American Physical Society's 2019 March meeting taking place this week in Boston.
Knitting — the key skill for the future. And not so bad in the past or present.
Image
The image comes via Andy Brunning at Compound Interest. Visit his site for a larger, easier to read version.