Scientists use dogs to track down dangerous insects: 'Easier for a dog to smell something than it is for a human to see something'
The Wildlife Society reports that organizations like the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference and Working Dogs for Conservation are putting dogs and their keen sense of smell to good use in the fight against an invasive species: the spotted lanternfly. Sightings of the destructive insect were first confirmed in 2014 in Pennsylvania and have reached at least 18 other states.
As the referenced study published in Ecosphere discovered, humans have spotted visible eggs in vineyards, but canines had 3.4 times more detections than people in more complex areas where the insects overwinter, such as forests. In other words, they can sniff out invasions that aren't obvious to humans.
"The dogs find egg masses by smell," Angela Fuller, professor in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment at Cornell University, told The Wildlife Society. "So, in a very complex environment, it's easier for a dog to smell something than it is for a human to see something that is small and cryptic."
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These insects are harmful to the environment as they destroy vegetation, including trees. Infestations have killed off entire wine vines in a single growing season.
When plants and trees die, so do several animal habitats and food sources, such as those for beneficial pollinators at the start of the food chain. Most of the planet's oxygen also comes from trees and grass — one tree alone can produce enough oxygen for four people, reports the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Therefore, recruiting pups to protect the health of the plants in these forests and vineyards helps many.
A collaboration between working dogs and nature trails is the perfect storm to battle this invasion. The New York-New Jersey Trail Conference boasts over 2,000 volunteers who help keep trails safe. Working Dogs for Conservation gives shelter dogs new life by training them to sniff out biological threats like invasive seedlings.
The collaboration began in 2019, when experts trained a labrador retriever and a Belgian malinois to find live spotted lanternflies through positive reinforcement. Eventually, training evolved into having the dogs identify egg masses, specifically the ones belonging to the lanternflies.
Other important finds by these working dogs have included Chinese bush clover in Iowa and Yellow star thistle in Colorado. The canines even help the biosecurity of an area by distinguishing between disease-infected and uninfected scat from animals of the same species.
The New York-New Jersey Trail Conference has been building and cleaning trails since 1923. You can do your part by keeping areas clean and alerting local authorities if you spot an invasive species.
Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
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CNN
2 hours ago
- CNN
Accidental find in planetarium show could shift scientists' understanding of our solar system
CNN — An accidental discovery might change how we think about one of the most mysterious structures in our solar system. The Oort Cloud, a large expanse of icy bodies revolving around the sun at a distance 1,000 times greater than the orbit of Neptune, is widely thought to be spherical — although it has never been directly observed. But during the preproduction of a show titled 'Encounters in the Milky Way,' which debuted Monday at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, a projection on the planetarium's dome revealed something strange within the Oort Cloud: a spiral. The curators were testing out a scene in September that includes a detailed view of Earth's celestial neighborhood — from the sun to the solar system's outer edges — and were surprised when they saw the structure, which looked coincidentally similar to a spiral galaxy such as our own. 'We hit play on the scene, and immediately we saw it. It was just there,' recalled Jackie Faherty, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History and the curator of the show. 'I was confused and thought that was super weird. I didn't know if it was an artifact, I didn't know if it was real.' To investigate, Faherty got in touch with David Nesvorny, an institute scientist with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and the Oort Cloud expert who had provided scientific data for the scene. 'We didn't create it — David did,' Faherty said. 'This is David's simulation, and it's grounded in physics. It has a totally good physical explanation for why it should be there.' At first, Nesvorny suspected artifacts — abnormalities or distortions in the data visualization — but once he looked at his data, he confirmed the presence of the spiral and eventually published a scientific paper about the discovery in April in The Astrophysical Journal. 'Weird way to discover things,' he said. 'I should know my data better, after years of working with it.' Crazy, long orbits The existence of the Oort Cloud was first proposed in 1950 by Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, who imagined it as a shell of icy bodies swirling around the sun from up to 1.5 light-years away. The cloud is the most distant region in our solar system, stretching as much as halfway to the next star, according to NASA. It's composed of leftovers from the making of our solar system, which were scattered in every direction by the planets after they formed. That means many of the icy bodies in the Oort Cloud don't share the same orbital plane as the solar system itself but travel at various inclinations, which is why the Oort Cloud is pictured as a sphere. If one of those icy bodies gets flung inward toward the sun, the heat starts vaporizing some of the material in the body, creating a tail — and what we call a comet. 'Every now and again, some of these icy bodies come into the inner solar system, and we can see the orbit that they're on,' Faherty said. 'And they're on these really crazy, long orbits. It can take them millions of years to go around the sun. And when they come in, they help us understand how far away they may have come from.' The problem with trying to imagine what the Oort Cloud looks like is that scientists have never seen it, even though we are technically surrounded by it. That's because the bodies that make it up are small — fewer than 60 miles (97 kilometers) in diameter — and even though they potentially number in the trillions, they are far away, making observations with telescopes difficult. The spiral was hiding in Nesvorny's data because he had never thought of visualizing it three-dimensionally. 'I never looked at it in Cartesian coordinates — I didn't have a good reason to do so,' he said. 'But once you do that, it's obvious. It's there.' The galactic tide To confirm the findings, Nesvorny used one of the most powerful computers in the world, NASA's Pleiades Supercomputer, to run simulations that took weeks to complete. 'I thought, maybe just this particular simulation (I gave the planetarium) is showing it, and all the other simulations with other stellar encounters, other parameters, will not show it, in which case it wouldn't be so interesting,' he said. 'But all the simulations, all the models I have, show the spiral.' The reason it's there, he said, is that objects in the Oort Cloud are far away enough from the sun's gravity that they also start being affected by the galactic tide — the gravitational field of our galaxy, exerted by the stars and the dark matter in it. This field is acting on the small bodies and comets in the Oort Cloud by twisting their orbital planes to create a spiral. The spiral, Nesvorny added, is in the inner part of the Oort Cloud, the closest to us, and he still believes that the outer portion is spherical or shell-shaped. The problem of observing the Oort Cloud remains, even though the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a powerful telescope that recently came online in Chile, could offer a hand by discovering and observing individual icy bodies in the cloud. However, according to Nesvorny, the telescope will likely discover dozens of these bodies — not the hundreds that would be required to produce a meaningful visualization of the spiral. The spiral theory helps to illuminate the dynamics of our solar system, according to Faherty. 'If you're going to come up with a theory of how solar systems evolve, you should take into account the kind of shapes you might have in their structure,' she said. 'Maybe comets helped deliver water to Earth. Maybe the building blocks of life could be out there in the Oort Cloud, so if you want to talk about the potential building blocks of life that surround our solar system, you need to understand its shape.' It's a 'dream,' she added, to be able to present science so recent in a show aimed at the general public. 'I truly believe that the planetarium, the dome itself, is a research tool,' Faherty said. 'I like to say that this is science that hasn't had time to reach your textbook yet.' Viewing what's not visible The spiral finding is a wonderful example of just how much we can learn through visualizing the universe in new ways, said Malena Rice, an assistant professor of astronomy at Yale University who did not participate in the study. 'This result reshapes our mental image of our home solar system, while also providing a new sense for what extrasolar systems' Oort clouds may look like,' Rice added. 'It unites our models of the solar system with what we know about the broader galaxy, placing it into context as a dynamic system. We are not static, and we are not isolated — our solar system is shaped by its broader ecosystem, and the Oort spiral exemplifies that.' While the paper is interesting, it is almost entirely theoretical, as it is based on numerical simulations of the interactions between the sun's gravity and the gravitational pull of the rest of the Milky Way galaxy's motion, said Edward Gomez, an astrophysicist and honorary lecturer at Cardiff University in the UK. He also was not involved with the study. 'Long period comets enter the inner solar system at a range of angles, which the authors try to model using their spiral arm idea,' Gomez said in an email. 'What they are proposing could be true, but it could also be modelled by other shapes of the Oort cloud or physical processes. How to test this is their major issue, because only a handful of potential Oort cloud objects are known about.' Confirming the findings will be a challenge, noted Simon Portegies Zwart, a professor of numerical star dynamics at Leiden University in the Netherlands who was not part of the team behind the research. 'It is interesting that they found the spiral, (but) it seems unlikely that we are going to witness (it) in the foreseeable future,' he said. With luck, he added, the Vera Rubin observatory will detect a few hundred inner Oort Cloud objects, but the spiral would only be visible if many more are found: 'It therefore seems unlikely to be a clearly detectable structure.'
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Chinese nationals investigation: MSU expert on alleged smuggled fungus
The Brief Chinese nationals are being investigated for allegedly smuggling biological materials into the U.S. A Michigan State University researcher says this is an ongoing food safety effort. Experts say proper protocols are needed for importing biological research materials safely. EAST LANSING, Mich. (FOX 2) - As the investigation continues into Chinese nationals accused of smuggling biological material into the U.S., a researcher at Michigan State University (MSU) hopes the public doesn't lose sight of ongoing efforts to keep our food supply safe. What we know As Chinese nationals are being investigated for allegedly smuggling biological material into the U.S., former FBI agent Bill Kowalski spoke to FOX 2. "Clearly, there are countries that would desire to hurt the U.S.," said Kowalski. "I don't know that it would kill people immediately, but economically it would be a great destruction for us." The backstory A week prior, two Chinese nationals were charged after an investigation showed one tried to smuggle a fungus into the U.S., allegedly for research at the University of Michigan. What they're saying An MSU professor has studied the fungus extensively. "This fungus, Fusarium graminearum, is naturally occurring, it is probably native to North America, so it is widely prevalent across the landscape and worldwide, actually," said Dr. Martin Chilvers with MSU. "It's already here. It already does do damage to our crops, and that's probably part of the reason why these researchers had a strain of this fungus, so they could do additional research to understand the way it interacts with plants." A third Chinese national was charged for allegedly lying about packages containing suspected biological pathogens, including ground worms that were sent to a U-M lab. "It is used in a lot of research to look at cellular development and the genetics of cellular development. It's a nematode that is distributed globally and can be found across the world," Chilvers said. He said that the worms and fungus present a low threat, but proper protocols for bringing them to the U.S. should be followed. "You apply for a permit, they make sure that you can bring it in and secure that isolate, and then destroy it once you finish doing any research. Even if it is relatively low risk, we still go through these procedures to minimize any risk," Chilvers said. What's next Despite the federal investigation, researchers hope the public understands efforts are underway to keep food safe. "There is a lot of research being done across the country and around the world to combat some of these plant diseases that we deal with around the world and here in the U.S., so that we can better manage those and ensure the safety of food production," Chilvers said. What they're saying The University of Michigan issued a statement in response to the arrests. "We have a commitment to groundbreaking research to improve the lives of others. We also have a strong commitment to protect the public and our national security. That's why the University of Michigan takes seriously its duty and responsibility to comply with all applicable laws and policies. These laws and policies promote safety, protect the public, and ensure national security issues are addressed. We cannot and will not tolerate violations of this responsibility if we truly care about the research enterprise we have built together. For these reasons, compliance with federal regulations and university policies is a requirement, not an option. Recently, several individuals have been accused of trying to transport materials across international borders in violation of federal laws and U-M policies, and of making false statements to law enforcement. The university takes these situations extremely seriously." The university said it is fully cooperating and reviewing all policies and protocols.
Yahoo
7 hours ago
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China testing orbital refueling procedures for satellite missions
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