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Tag: University of Wyoming

  • Engineer launches quest to address dangerous threat at nuclear power plants: ‘Revolutionize the design’

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    Both spatially and financially, nuclear reactors are costly projects — especially when deterred by natural earthly causes. In particular, nuclear infrastructure can easily be disrupted by seismic activity.

    To address the issue, University of Wyoming researcher Ankit Saxena recently received a two-year grant of nearly $200,000 from the National Science Foundation in order to pursue the study of particle dampers.

    According to the university release, the project’s aim is to “revolutionize the design of particle dampers using topology optimization, an advanced engineering design technique” in the hopes of affording nuclear infrastructure better protection from seismic waves.

    Conventional particle dampers involve a cavity in which entrapped particles can sense and respond to external vibrations, dissipating any interference as it arrives. Unfortunately, the development of these dampers has proved complex and expensive in the past, so Saxena intends to simplify and optimize their design with an emphasis on dispelling seismic frequencies.

    Meanwhile, Saxena and his team aim to establish research partnerships with universities across the United States, boosting the project’s visibility and scope in the long term, per the Wyoming release.

    Discovering and stabilizing a diversity of cleaner energy resources can facilitate our transition toward a more sustainable future. With global electricity demand on the rise, traditional fuel-based power plants are working overtime to keep up, releasing carbon pollution at higher rates into our atmosphere and driving up our planet’s temperatures.

    Although solar and wind power tend to be the most commercially viable options when it comes to renewable energy, nuclear power isn’t far behind. While still an imperfect solution — considering the massive expenses required in developing nuclear reactors and the radioactive waste by-product of nuclear fission — nuclear plants are capable of yielding massive amounts of energy with far less pollution than that generated through the combustion of fossil fuels. The latest research grant may help bolster the reliability of nuclear energy in the face of seismic activity over the years to come.

    “While this NSF project specifically focuses on seismic protection of nuclear power plants, the topology optimization-based particle damper design methodology … has broad applicability across a wide range of real-world systems,” Saxena told the university.

    Join our free newsletter for weekly updates on the latest innovations improving our lives and shaping our future, and don’t miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.

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  • ‘If Exercise Could Cure This, I Would Have Been Cured So Quickly’

    ‘If Exercise Could Cure This, I Would Have Been Cured So Quickly’

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    In the weeks after she caught COVID, in May 2022, Lauren Shoemaker couldn’t wait to return to her usual routine of skiing, backpacking, and pregaming her family’s eight-mile hikes with three-mile jogs. All went fine in the first few weeks after her infection. Then, in July, hours after finishing a hike, Shoemaker started to feel off; two days later, she couldn’t make it to the refrigerator without feeling utterly exhausted. Sure it was a fluke, she tried to hike again—and this time, was out of commission for months. Shoemaker, an ecologist at the University of Wyoming, couldn’t do her alpine fieldwork; she struggled to follow a movie with a complex plot. She was baffled. Exercise, the very thing that had reliably energized her before, had suddenly become a trigger for decline.

    For the majority of people, exercise is scientifically, physiologically, psychologically good. It boosts immunity, heart function, cognition, mood, energy, even life span. Doctors routinely prescribe it to patients recovering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and heart attacks, managing metabolic disease, or hoping to stave off cognitive decline. Conditions that worsen when people strive for fitness are very rare. Post-exertional malaise (PEM), which affects Shoemaker and most other people with long COVID, just happens to be one of them.

    PEM, first described decades ago as a hallmark of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), is now understood to fundamentally alter the body’s ability to generate and use energy. For people with PEM, just about any form of physical, mental, or emotional exertion—in some cases, activities no more intense than answering emails, folding laundry, or digesting a particularly rare steak—can spark a debilitating wave of symptoms called a crash that may take weeks or months to abate. Simply sitting upright for too long can leave Letícia Soares, a long-hauler living in Brazil, temporarily bedbound. When she recently moved into a new home, she told me, she didn’t bother buying a dining table or chairs—“it just felt useless.”

    Read: How much less to worry about long COVID now

    When it comes to PEM, intense exercise—designed to boost fitness—is “absolutely contraindicated,” David Putrino, a physical therapist who runs a long-COVID clinic at Mount Sinai, in New York, told me. And yet, the idea that exertion could undo a person rather than returning them to health is so counterintuitive that some clinicians and researchers still endorse its potential benefits for those with PEM; it’s dogma that Shoemaker heard repeatedly after she first fell ill. “If exercise could cure this,” she told me, “I would have been cured so quickly.”

    The problem is, there’s no consensus about what people who have PEM should do instead. Backing off physical activity too much might start its own downward spiral, as people lose muscle mass and strength in a phenomenon called deconditioning. Navigating the middle ground between deconditioning and crashing is “where the struggle begins,” Denyse Lutchmansingh, a pulmonary specialist at Yale, told me. And as health experts debate which side to err on, millions of long-haulers are trying to strike their own balance.

    Though it’s now widely accepted that PEM rejiggers the body’s capacity for strain, scientists still aren’t sure of the precise biological causes. Some studies have found evidence of impaired blood flow, stymieing the delivery of oxygen to cells; others have discovered broken mitochondria struggling to process raw fuel into power. A few have seen hints of excessive inflammation, and immune cells aberrantly attacking muscles; others point to issues with recovery, perhaps via a slowdown in the clearance of lactate and other metabolic debris.

    The nature of the crashes that follow exertion can be varied, sprawling, and strange. They might appear hours or days after a catalyst. They can involve flu-like coughs or sore throats. They may crater a patient’s cognitive capacity or plague them with insomnia for weeks; they can leave people feeling so fatigued and pained, they’re almost unable to move. Some of Shoemaker’s toughest crashes have saddled her with tinnitus, numbness, and extreme sensitivity to sound and light. Triggers can also change over time; so can people’s symptoms—even the length of the delay before a crash.

    But perhaps the worst part is what an accumulation of crashes can do. Rob Wüst, who studies skeletal-muscle physiology at Amsterdam University Medical Center, told me that his team has found an unusual amount of muscle damage after exertion in people with PEM that may take months to heal. People who keep pushing themselves past their limit could watch their baseline for exertion drop, and then drop again. “Every time you PEM yourself, you travel a little further down the rabbit hole,” Betsy Keller, an exercise physiologist at Ithaca College, told me.

    Read: Long COVID has forced a reckoning for one of medicine’s most neglected diseases

    Still, the goal of managing PEM has never been to “just lay in a bed all day and don’t do anything,” Lily Chu, the vice president of the International Association for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (IACFS/ME), told me. In the 1960s, a group of scientists found that three weeks of bed rest slashed healthy young men’s capacity for exertion by nearly 30 percent. (The participants eventually trained themselves back to baseline.) Long periods of bed rest were once commonly prescribed for recovery from heart attacks, says Prashant Rao, a sports cardiologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Massachusetts. But now too much rest is actively avoided, because “there’s a real risk of spiraling down, and symptoms worsening,” Rao told me. “I really fear for that, even for people with PEM.”

    There is no rulebook for threading this needle, which has led researchers to approach treatments and rehabilitation for long COVID in different ways. Some clinical trials that involve exercise as an intervention explicitly exclude people with PEM. “We did not feel like the exercise program we designed would be safe for those individuals,” Johanna Sick, a physiologist at the University of Vienna who is helping run one such trial, told me.

    Other researchers hold out hope that activity-based interventions may still help long-haulers, and are keeping patients with PEM in experiments. But some of those decisions have been controversial. The government-sponsored RECOVER trial was heavily criticized last year for its plan to enroll long-haulers in an exercise study. Scientists have since revised the trial’s design to reroute participants with moderate to severe PEM to another intervention, according to Adrian Hernandez, the Duke cardiologist leading the trial. The details are still being finalized, but the plan is to instead look at pacing, a strategy for monitoring activity levels to ensure that people stay below their crash threshold, Janna Friedly, a physiatrist at the University of Washington who’s involved in the trial, told me.

    Certain experimental regimens can be light enough—stretching, recumbent exercises—to be tolerable by many (though not all) people with PEM. Some researchers are trying to monitor participants’ heart rate, and having them perform only activities that keep them in a low-intensity zone. But even when patients’ limitations are taken into account, crashes can be hard to avoid, Tania Janaudis-Ferreira, a physiotherapist at McGill University, in Quebec, told me. She recently wrapped a clinical trial in which, despite tailoring the regimen to each individual, her team still documented several mild to moderate crashes among participants with PEM.

    Read: Long COVID is being erased—again

    Just how worrisome crashes are is another matter of contention. Pavlos Bobos, a musculoskeletal-health researcher at the University of Western Ontario, told me that he’d like to see more evidence of harm before ruling out exercise for long COVID and PEM. Bruno Gualano, a physiologist at the University of São Paulo, told me that even though crashes seem temporarily damaging, he’s not convinced that exercise worsens PEM in the long term. But Putrino, of Mount Sinai, is adamant that crashes set people back; most other experts I spoke with agreed. And several researchers told me that, because PEM seems to upend basic physiology, reduced activity may not be as worrisome for people with the condition as it is for those without.

    For Shoemaker, the calculus is clear. “Coming back from being deconditioned is honestly trivial compared to recovering from PEM,” she told me. She’s willing to wait for evidence-based therapies that can safely improve her PEM. “Whatever we figure out, if I could get healthy,” she told me, “then I can get back in shape.”

    At this point, several patients and researchers told me, most exercise-based trials for long COVID seem to be at best a waste of resources, and at worst a recipe for further harm. PEM is not new, nor are the interventions being tested. Decades of research on ME/CFS have already shown that traditional exercise therapy harms more often than it helps. (Some researchers insisted that more PEM studies are needed in long-haulers—just in case the condition diverges substantially from its manifestation in ME/CFS.) And although a subset of long-haulers could be helped by exercise, experts don’t yet have a great way to safely distinguish them from the rest.

    Even pacing, although often recommended for symptom management, is not generally considered to be a reliable treatment, which is where most long-COVID patient advocates say funds should be focused. Ideally, Putrino and others told me, resources should be diverted to trials investigating drugs that might address PEM’s roots, such as the antiviral Paxlovid, which could clear lingering virus from long-haulers’ tissues. Some researchers are also hopeful about pyridostigmine, a medication that might enhance the delivery of oxygen to tissues, as well as certain supplements that might support mitochondria on the fritz.

    Those interventions are still experimental—and Putrino said that no single one is likely to work for everyone. That only adds to the challenge of studying PEM, which has been shrouded in disbelief for decades. Despite years of research on ME/CFS, Chu, of the IACFS/ME, told me that many people with the condition have encountered medical professionals who suggest that they’re just anxious, even lazy. It doesn’t help that there’s not yet a blood test for PEM; to diagnose it, doctors must ask their patients questions and trust the answers. Just two decades ago, researchers and physicians speculated that PEM stemmed from an irrational fear of activity; some routinely prescribed therapy, antidepressants, and just pushing through, Chu said. One highly publicized 2011 study, since widely criticized as shoddy science, appeared to support those claims—influencing treatment recommendations from top health authorities such as the CDC.

    The CDC and other organizations have since reversed their position on exercise and cognitive behavioral therapy as PEM treatments. Even so, many people with long COVID and ME/CFS are still routinely told to blow past their limits. All of the long-haulers I spoke with have encountered this advice, and learned to ignore it. Fighting those calls to exercise can be exhausting in its own right. As Ed Yong wrote in The Atlantic last year, American society has long stigmatized people who don’t push their way through adversity—even if that adversity is a medically documented condition that cannot be pushed through. Reconceptualizing the role of exercise in daily living is already a challenge; it is made all the more difficult when being productive—even overworked—is prized above all else.

    Read: Fatigue can shatter a person

    Long-haulers know that tension intimately; some have had to battle it within themselves. When Julia Moore Vogel, a researcher at Scripps, developed long COVID in the summer of 2020, she was at first determined to grit her way through. She took up pilates and strength training, workouts she at the time considered gentle. But the results were always the same: horrific migraines that relegated her to bed. She now does physical therapy to keep herself moving in safe and supervised amounts. When Vogel, a former competitive runner, started her program, she was taken aback by how little she was asked to do—sometimes just two reps of chin tucks. “I would always laugh because I would be like, ‘These are not exercises,’” she told me. “I’ve had to change my whole mental model about what exercise is, what exertion is.”

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    Katherine J. Wu

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  • Study raises doubts about the effectiveness of controlling sagebrush to protect sage grouse.

    Study raises doubts about the effectiveness of controlling sagebrush to protect sage grouse.

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    Newswise — Efforts to improve sage grouse habitat through conventional management practices may be ineffective — and even counterproductive — according to research by University of Wyoming and other scientists.

    Sagebrush reduction strategies, including mowing and herbicide application, are often employed to enhance habitat for the greater sage grouse and other sagebrush-dependent species. The theory is that clearing large sagebrush shrubs improves food sources in sage grouse nesting and brood-rearing habitats by allowing other, more nutritious vegetation to grow with less competition. This, in turn, should increase invertebrate populations, another food source for sage grouse.

    But a new paper published in the journal Wildlife Monographs suggests these methods may be misguided.

    In a nine-year experimental study, researchers examined how sage grouse populations in central Wyoming responded to mowing and applying the herbicide tebuthiuron to Wyoming big sagebrush. According to their data, these treatments did not benefit the birds.

    “Some managers think, ‘Treating sagebrush for wildlife is how it’s supposed to work, and we’ll keep doing it,’” says Jeff Beck, a UW professor of ecosystem science and management and principal investigator for the study. “Hopefully, this will get people to start thinking, ‘If we’re going to spend money to improve habitat, we’ve got to find some other ideas.’”

    Beck’s co-authors include Kurt Smith, a former UW Ph.D. student who is now an ecologist with Western EcoSystems Technology; Jason LeVan, a former UW M.S. student who is now a range and wildlife conservationist for Pheasants Forever; Anna Chalfoun, a UW associate professor and assistant unit leader of the U.S. Geological Survey Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit; Stanley Harter, a wildlife biologist with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department; Thomas Christiansen, a retired Wyoming Game and Fish Department sage grouse program coordinator; and Sue Oberlie, a retired Bureau of Land Management (BLM) wildlife biologist.

    The researchers tracked behaviors and survival rates of more than 600 female greater sage grouse in response to mowing and tebuthiuron application. They also monitored effects on invertebrate populations, sagebrush and herbaceous vegetation. Throughout the study, responses were compared to untreated plots near the treated areas as well as off-site control plots.

    Pretreatment data were collected from 2011-13; mowing and tebuthiuron applications were implemented in winter and spring 2014.

    After six years (2014-19) of post-treatment monitoring, Beck and his colleagues determined that sage grouse responses to treatment were neutral at best.

    “Neither mowing nor tebuthiuron treatments influenced nest success, brood success or female survival,” they reported.

    Furthermore, treatments used to reduce Wyoming big sagebrush coverage resulted in slight avoidance by sage grouse.

    Invertebrates and herbaceous vegetation also did not respond positively to reduction of Wyoming big sagebrush, indicating treatments did not improve the quantity and quality of sage grouse food sources. 

    Instead, reduction of Wyoming big sagebrush cover may negatively impact sage grouse and other species that use sagebrush shrubs to nest and seek refuge from predators, the researchers suggest.

    They predict that expanding experimental treatments to larger areas may reveal greater negative effects of Wyoming big sagebrush reduction on sage grouse populations.

    “Management practices that focus on the maintenance of large, undisturbed tracts of sagebrush will best facilitate the persistence of sage grouse populations and other species reliant on the sagebrush steppe,” they wrote.

    Their results are consistent with many other studies suggesting that controlling Wyoming big sagebrush negatively impacts wildlife. However, they caution, their findings should not be generalized to other sagebrush species and subspecies, such as mountain big sagebrush.

    Rather than removing Wyoming big sagebrush, Beck says, conservation strategies should focus on removing encroaching pinyon and juniper and invasive species such as cheatgrass. These types of vegetation alter the sagebrush ecosystem and influence fire cycles, potentially damaging sage grouse habitat.

    Enhancing wet areas in sagebrush habitats is another promising strategy for improving the quality of sage grouse brood-rearing habitat, he notes.

     

    This research was supported by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s Wyoming Sage-grouse Conservation Fund; the Bates Hole, Big Horn Basin, South-Central, Southwest and Wind River/Sweetwater River local sage grouse working groups; the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust; the BLM’s Lander field office; the Margaret and Sam Kelly Ornithological Research Fund; and the Wyoming Reclamation and Restoration Center’s graduate assistantship program.

     

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    University of Wyoming

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  • State Support for Higher Ed Continues to Rise. Yet Public Colleges Still Face Headwinds.

    State Support for Higher Ed Continues to Rise. Yet Public Colleges Still Face Headwinds.

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    While enrollment is down at the nation’s public colleges, state funding for higher ed is up — and students have been footing less of the bill for their education over the last four years.

    State and local support for higher ed increased nearly 5 percent in the 2022 fiscal year, according to the latest State Higher Education Finance report, published on Thursday by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. States allocated more money for higher education both in the form of financial aid, which increased 2 percent, and general public operations, which increased 7 percent. (The report adjusted those proportions for inflation.)

    The SHEF report, released annually since 2003, is a data set detailing state and local funding for both two- and four-year higher-education institutions, as well as tuition revenue and enrollment. The association measures state support and net tuition revenue per student by considering enrollment on the basis of full-time-equivalent students, or FTE.

    The growth in higher-ed funding since the pandemic-related economic downturn of 2020 bucks a historical trend, according to the report. Recessions traditionally lead to lower state support for public higher education, which prompts colleges to raise tuition and other costs for students.

    In the 2022 fiscal year, the “student share” — which the association defines as the percentage of total revenue that comes from tuition for each full-time student — decreased in 32 states and Washington, D.C. In Connecticut, Kansas, Louisiana, and New Jersey, the student share has fallen below 50 percent of total revenue in each of the last five years.

    The report’s authors, Kelsey Kunkle and Sophia Laderman, attributed that trend to three factors: the national enrollment decline, increasing commitments at the state-government level to higher-education funding, and some federal stimulus money given to states for higher education during the pandemic.

    Still, Kunkle told The Chronicle, students’ tuition and fees continue to make up far more of public colleges’ revenue — nearly 42 percent — than in 1980, when that share was just 21 percent.

    Robert Kelchen, a professor in the department of educational leadership and policy studies at University of Tennessee at Knoxville who studies higher-education finance with a focus on state funding, said the report is significant because states and colleges often use it as a barometer with which to compare one another.

    “There have been states and universities that use this to try to advocate for more funding,” he said. “And then there are some states that try to match their peers.”

    Here are three other key takeaways from this year’s report.

    Some states are reinvesting in higher ed, but others are still cutting.

    States’ higher-ed funding over all has recovered to levels not seen since before the 2008 recession. In 28 states, however, the funding remains lower than it was before 2008. From 2008 to 2018, public-college funding dropped 9.1 percent.

    Finances have generally begun to recover from pandemic pressures, Kunkle said. “State budgets were hurting in 2021, but they’ve gotten a bit better,” she said.

    State financial aid, which accounted for nearly 10 percent of all higher-ed appropriations, was at a high of $990 per full-time student in 2022.

    The state with the largest funding increase was Nevada, with a 27-percent jump — in part due to money in the federal appropriations bill that passed Congress in March 2022. It contained $22 million for Nevada public colleges.

    The largest decrease, at more than 28 percent, was in Wyoming, whose Legislature cut $31.3 million in June 2021 from the University of Wyoming, the largest higher-ed institution in the state and the only public four-year college.

    Nationally, public-college revenue per full-time student — from both state appropriations and net tuition revenue — totaled $17,393, another record high. But the trend doesn’t hold in most of the country; only 11 states hit record highs.

    Federal pandemic relief provided one last windfall.

    State and local funding for higher education totaled $120.7 billion in the 2022 fiscal year, with $2.5 billion — or about 2 percent — coming from federal stimulus money. In the future, colleges won’t be able to count on that support: Pandemic-relief funding has nearly run out.

    Thirty-nine states used some stimulus funding for higher education in 2022, according to the report.

    The money both covered general state costs from the pandemic, preventing higher education from taking a hit from spending in other budget areas, and raised operating appropriations for higher education.

    Some states … are already feeling a fiscal cliff now that federal stimulus is waning.

    In Vermont, more than 42 percent of state appropriations for higher education came from federal stimulus money. In the previous year, both Vermont and Colorado used federal stimulus dollars for around half of their higher-education appropriations, but this year Colorado returned to regular state funding.

    “We’re really trying to hit home that it’s really important for states to prioritize and continue committing to funding higher education,” Kunkle said. “Because right now we do have some states that are already feeling a fiscal cliff now that federal stimulus is waning.”

    Enrollment challenges will be a long-term problem for public higher ed.

    From 2021 to 2022, public-college enrollment declined 2.5 percent, the second-largest decrease since 1980. The year before, public higher ed experienced a 3-percent drop.

    The report emphasizes that the bleeding is worse at community colleges. Net tuition revenue declined 7 percent at two-year institutions, compared with a fraction of 1 percent at four-year institutions in the last year.

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    Helen Huiskes

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  • Single Approach to Wild Horse Management Urged

    Single Approach to Wild Horse Management Urged

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    Newswise — The U.S. federal government’s management of wild horses is doomed to fail without fundamental changes in policy and the law, according to a new paper led by researchers at the University of Wyoming and Oklahoma State University.

    Because contrasting societal views have created an approach that simultaneously manages horses on the range as wildlife, livestock and pets, current government programs are incapable of succeeding, the researchers argue in the article that appears in the journal BioScience.

    “For the federal government to sustain healthy populations, ecosystem health and fiscal responsibility, lawmakers must properly define how feral equids should be labeled,” the scientists wrote. “Each label (wild, livestock, pet) has validity, and management plans can be implemented to optimize equid populations with other land uses. Furthermore, providing a clear definition of feral equids will determine the legal tools that can be applied for their management.”

    The lead author of the paper is Jacob Hennig, a former UW Ph.D. student who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Oklahoma State. Hennig’s advisers at UW — Professor Jeff Beck and Associate Professor Derek Scasta, both in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management — are co-authors of the paper. So are Oklahoma State Professor Sam Fuhlendorf and Assistant Professor Courtney Duchardt, who is a former UW Ph.D. student; Colorado State University research scientist Saeideh Esmaeili, also a former UW Ph.D. student; and Tolani Francisco, of Native Healing LLC in New Mexico.

    The researchers note that, while the fossil record shows there were horses in North America previously, they went extinct about 10,000 years ago.

    “The equids currently inhabiting North America did not coevolve there; they are descendants of livestock that underwent millennia of domestication and artificial selection,” the paper says. “Most large predators that would help limit their population growth went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene (epoch), and the Anthropocene (current epoch) has led to further predator reductions.”

    Because wild horses have no natural predators, cannot be legally hunted under federal law and are no longer slaughtered as livestock in the United States, their numbers on the range have more than doubled in the last decade, the researchers say. They also note that horses removed from the range by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and held in government facilities and private lands have grown in number by 33 percent during that time, with the BLM spending over $550 million since 2013 supporting the captive animals.

    “The BLM has increased the number of individuals removed from the wild in each of the past four years, leading to decreases in the on-range population,” the paper acknowledges. “However, the total on-range population is still approximately 50,000 individuals above the maximum (appropriate management level), and the recent moderate decrease in on-range individuals is directly correlated with an increase in the off-range population and subsequent expenditures.”

    Removing wild horses from Western rangelands and placing them in long-term holding is not a solution, the researchers say. Doing so “simply exports the issue elsewhere — including the imperiled tallgrass prairie ecosystem — with unknown ecological effects,” they wrote, noting that there are now about 23,500 wild horses on private lands in Oklahoma, five times more than the number on open range in Wyoming.

    Additionally, the paper contends that wild horses have a comparatively large impact on the range, as they consume more forage and water than ruminants such as cattle, per capita.

    The scientists credit the BLM for basing recent management on science, including better population estimates of wild horses and deploying measures to keep them from reproducing. But there are too many animals on the range for this approach to work.

    “Although the BLM has admirably increased fertility control research and application, if they are unable to also remove tens of thousands of equids, this process is doomed to be a Sisyphean task,” the researchers wrote.

    The federal Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971 essentially calls for wild horses to freely roam like wild animals, but they are treated differently from wild animals because the act prohibits hunting. At the same time, the BLM’s practice of gathering and removing wild horses from the range “more closely resemble livestock operations than wildlife management, whereas adoption programs, sales restrictions and the abolition of slaughter have resulted in feral equids effectively serving as society’s pets,” the paper says.

    Choosing one of the labels — wild, livestock or pets — offers the best hope for the federal government to succeed in wild horse management, the scientists wrote.

    “As a wild species that lacks sufficient predation to keep most populations in check, a hunting or culling program, like those for other wild ungulates, could slow their population growth,” the paper says. “As livestock, gathers and removals that lead to sale or slaughter would limit growth and give the animals the monetary value they currently lack. As pets, simultaneously conducting large-scale removals and administering fertility control, including permanent sterilization (and potentially euthanasia), could reduce population sizes and slow growth.”

    The researchers’ conclusion?

    “The current state of feral horse and burro management in the United States is unsustainable and will continue to be a painful resource sink without fundamental changes to the law. We recommend that the U.S. federal government should officially declare the status of feral equids as either wild, livestock or pets and should provide the BLM and (U.S. Forest Service) the legal latitude and funding to develop and implement respective management options.”

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    University of Wyoming

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  • Scientists use tardigrade proteins for human health breakthrough

    Scientists use tardigrade proteins for human health breakthrough

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    Newswise — University of Wyoming researchers’ study of how microscopic creatures called tardigrades survive extreme conditions has led to a major breakthrough that could eventually make life-saving treatments available to people where refrigeration isn’t possible.

    Thomas Boothby, an assistant professor of molecular biology, and colleagues have shown that natural and engineered versions of tardigrade proteins can be used to stabilize an important pharmaceutical used to treat people with hemophilia and other conditions without the need for refrigeration — even amid high temperatures and other difficult conditions. The findings are detailed today (Monday) in Scientific Reports, an online, open access journal from the publishers of Nature.

    The pharmaceutical, human blood clotting Factor VIII, is an essential therapeutic used to treat genetic disease and instances of extreme bleeding. Despite being critical and effective in treating patients in these circumstances, Factor VIII has a serious shortcoming, in that it is inherently unstable. Without stabilization within a precise temperature range, Factor VIII will break down.

    “In underdeveloped regions, during natural disasters, during space flight or on the battlefield, access to refrigerators and freezers, as well as ample electricity to run this infrastructure, can be in short supply. This often means that people who need access to Factor VIII do not get it,” Boothby says. “Our work provides a proof of principle that we can stabilize Factor VIII, and likely many other pharmaceuticals, in a stable, dry state at room or even elevated temperatures using proteins from tardigrades — and, thus, provide critical live-saving medicine to everyone everywhere.”

    Measuring less than half a millimeter long, tardigrades — also known as water bears — can survive being completely dried out; being frozen to just above absolute zero (about minus 458 degrees Fahrenheit, when all molecular motion stops); heated to more than 300 degrees Fahrenheit; irradiated several thousand times beyond what a human could withstand; and even survive the vacuum of outer space. They are able to do so, in part, by manufacturing a sugar called trehalose and a protein called CAHS D.

    According to the research paper, Boothby and his colleagues fine-tuned the biophysical properties of both trehalose and CAHS D to stabilize Factor VIII, noting that CAHS D is most suitable for the treatment. The stabilization allows Factor VIII to be available in austere conditions without refrigeration, including repeated dehydration/rehydration, extreme heat and long-term dry storage.

    The researchers believe the same thing can be done with other biologics — pharmaceuticals containing or derived from living organisms — such as vaccines, antibodies, stem cells, blood and blood products.

    “This study shows that dry preservation methods can be effective in protecting biologics, offering a convenient, logistically simple and economically viable means of stabilizing life-saving medicines,” Boothby says. “This will be beneficial not only for global health initiatives in remote or developing parts of the world, but also for fostering a safe and productive space economy, which will be reliant on new technologies that break our dependence on refrigeration for the storage of medicine, food and other biomolecules.”

    Boothby and other researchers hope that their discoveries can be applied to address other societal and global health issues as well, including water scarcity. For example, their work might lead to better ways of generating engineered crops that can cope with harsh environments.

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    University of Wyoming

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  • Inverted Dancers Have More Acute Visuomotor Perception

    Inverted Dancers Have More Acute Visuomotor Perception

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    Newswise — Previous studies have determined that astronauts can judge inverted movements better than people on Earth due to the astronauts’ unique visuomotor experience with inverted movements in space.

    Now, a new study, in which University of Wyoming researchers played key lead roles, shows that people on Earth with extended visuomotor experience with inverted movements — such as vertical dancers — can overcome the inversion effect in perceiving biological motion.  

    Qin Zhu, a UW professor of kinesiology and health, was lead and senior author of a paper titled “Extended Visuomotor Experience With Inverted Movements Can Overcome the Inversions of Effect in Biological Motion Perception” that was published Oct. 20 in Scientific Reports, an online peer-reviewed, open-access journal that covers all areas of the natural sciences.

    “As indicated by the title of the article, we proved that the inversion effect in biological motion perception (BMP) can be overcome,” Zhu says. “BMP is intriguing because it is a survival skill humans and animals both share. We can read the motions produced by others in same or different species and figure out who the actor is and what is intended by the actor. So, we can better prepare our response, either to escape or engage. However, if the motion is performed upside-down, or inverted, such a capability will be greatly impaired.”

    Margaret Wilson, professor and head of the UW Department of Theatre and Dance, was second author of the paper. For the study, Wilson provided the list of vertical dance movements; facilitated motion-capture of the movements; recruited vertical dancers for the experiment; and revised the paper.

    Xiaoye Wang, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Kinesiology and Physical Education at the University of Toronto, was another lead author of the paper. Zhu worked with Wang to conceptualize and implement the study; analyze results; and draft and revise the paper.

    Other contributors were from Shanghai University of Sport and Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, who helped recruit participants in China to help increase the diversity of sample sizes of the study.

    The study was composed of 52 adult volunteers — 15 participants without any dance experience; 21 participants with an average of 7.71 years of typical dance experience; and 16 participants with 4.75 years of vertical dance experience. The vertical dancers were from UW and Europe.

    Subjects were presented 40 dance movements as point-light displays on a computer. There were 10 pairs of dance movements, with each pair including a dance movement performed on the ground and another performed in the air. In half of the test trials, the display was artificially inverted. Vertical dancers, traditional dancers and non-dancers were asked whether the display was artificially inverted or as it was.

    Only vertical dancers could identify the inversion movements performed in the air. Vertical dancers were equally capable of identifying an artificial inversion regardless of whether the dance movement was performed on the ground or in the air.

    Traditional dancers and non-dancers — who had no experience with performing inverted movement — could not distinguish the inversion on the point-light display for the inverted movements performed in the air, according to the paper. The paper’s findings suggest that visuomotor experience with inverted movements plays a more critical role in allowing observers to identify in the inverted biological motion.

    Zhu says those with experience viewing and/or performing inverted movements while suspended in the air can use that experience to perceive and understand the inverted movements.

    “Therefore, spectators who have seen vertical dance performances before will have a better understanding of inverted movements than those who have never seen such a performance,” Zhu says. “And, for those who want to learn and perform vertical dance in the future, both visual and motor training — with respect to the inverted movements — are required to improve awareness and perception of self-movements in relation to partners or spectators while performing vertical dance.”

    Zhu adds that people without any dance experience can judge the upright dance movements “pretty well” compared to trained dancers, which suggests that there are similarities between upright dance movements and movements in daily life.

    “Relating to science fiction, Spiderman should have a superior ability over others to read any inverted movements,” Zhu says.

    A follow-up study, using an eye tracker, has been performed to examine the visual search patterns of vertical dancers versus traditional dancers while each group observes the point-light displays to judge the actions.

    “Based on the research findings, a visual training program will be designed to train students who are enrolled in UW vertical dance classes,” Zhu says. 

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  • NASA Laser Project Benefits Animal Researchers, UW Scientists Show

    NASA Laser Project Benefits Animal Researchers, UW Scientists Show

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    Newswise — Scientists researching forest carnivores such as martens, foxes and coyotes spend hours clambering through rugged terrain, sometimes in deep snow, placing and baiting camera traps to learn about animals’ behavior in relation to their habitat.

    In recent years, this on-the-ground work has received a big boost from what might seem to be an unlikely source: NASA.

    In a new scholarly paper that details research in northwest Wyoming, University of Wyoming researchers explain how NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) mission can provide valuable information about the world’s forests for wildlife scientists. The article appears in the journal Forest Ecology and Management.

    Using a light detection and ranging (LiDAR) laser instrument installed on the International Space Station, GEDI collects high-resolution observations of the three-dimensional structure of Earth’s forest — including precise measurements of forest canopy height, canopy cover and vertical structure. GEDI was attached to the International Space Station in 2018 for a two-year mission that has been extended until January 2023; it is expected to collect over 10 billion samples of Earth’s tropical and temperate forests.

    “Our work indicated that spaceborne LiDAR collected from the GEDI mission provided a ready sampling of forest structure that could be combined with other remotely sensed data to improve our understanding of animal-habitat relationships,” wrote the researchers, led by Austin Smith, now an assistant research scientist for the team of Assistant Professor Joe Holbrook in UW’s Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources.

    Working in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem — including two national parks, parts of three national forests, one national wildlife refuge and Bureau of Land Management land — the researchers deployed 107 camera traps for three consecutive winters. Based on photographs of target species, they calculated habitat use for Pacific martens, Rocky Mountain red foxes and coyotes, along with prey species red squirrels and snowshoe hares.

    The scientists then paired data from GEDI with other remote-sensing platforms to create forest height and structure maps, which they used to run computer models to evaluate animal-environment relationships. They found that the pairing of GEDI data with other sensors resulted in a substantial improvement in characterizing vertical and horizontal forest structure, which aided efforts to understand important habitat features for the animals studied.

    “Our successes are likely transferrable to other landscapes and animal species, which is important given the large-scale disturbances that are occurring in Western forests, such as wildfire and bark beetle outbreaks,” the researchers say.

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