Dena Headlee: There's some very cold science
going on in New Hampshire.
An NSF-funded team of scientists has captured one of nature’s
most destructive forces, ice.
Large ice storms are expected
to become more frequent in the Northeastern
U.S. They destruct lives
and damage infrastructure in towns
and cities in Northern New England,
resulting in billions of dollars of damage.
Ice also re-shapes the forest with toppled branches
and reduce tree growth and changes habitat for wildlife.
The team says science is critical to understanding
the extent of these changes and their short
and long-term effects on northern forests.
The unpredictable nature of ice storms
makes studying them a real challenge.
So instead of waiting for the next big storm to hit,
the team created their own suite
of experimental ice storms
in eight large plots on the USDA’s Hubbard
Brook Experimental Forest,
a National Science Foundation
long-term ecological research site.
After a year of preparation,
all the team needed was to wait
for several consecutive days of cold temperatures
and the single digits and enough
snow to maneuver the utility vehicles.
The team finally caught a break in late January.
Using firefighting equipment, generators
and low-pressure pumps,
the team directed nearby stream water through one
and a half inch hoses to a second set
of high-pressure pumps mounted on utility vehicles.
These pumps then pushed the cold water
100 feet into the air,
falling back over the forest as a fine mist,
freezing on contact.
The team iced eight plots,
each the size of a basketball court.
The scientist then went to work
using wooden ornaments with arms
to measure the ice accumulation,
hoping for the right amount of ice
on each plot needed to create the suite of perfect storms.
Having successfully created this ice lab,
the team now begins observing
and gathering data
about the kinds of changes these extreme weather
events cause to forests and wildlife.
The team hopes this research provides
the scientific community, land managers
and the public with greater insight
as to the impacts of these powerful winter storms
on the ecosystems in the northern hardwood forests.
This project is led by Syracuse University,
the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies,
Cornell University, the University of Vermont,
the University of Southern Maine
and the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation.
David Reitze, LIGO Laboratory Executive Director, Caltech:
We have detected gravitational waves.
We did it!
Dena Headlee: One hundred years
after Einstein predicted
the existence of ripples in space time,
today scientists confirmed
the first direct detection of gravitational waves.
The team says these ripples
were the result of a violent collision
between two massive black holes;
a collision that took place 1.3 billion years ago.
The gravitational waves were detected at the National Science
Foundation’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory,
LIGO, and the discovery was made
by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.
David Reitze: The two LIGO observatories in Hanford,
Washington and Livingston, Louisiana,
recorded a signal nearly at the same time,
nearly simultaneously and the signal
had a very specific characteristic,
a characteristic of as time went forward, the frequency went up.
And what was amazing about this signal
is that it’s exactly what you would expect
what Einstein’s theory of general relativity would predict
for two big massive objects
like black holes inspiraling
and merging together.
Dena Headlee: This landmark discovery confirms
a major prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
The team says LIGO opens up
a whole new window on the universe.
Researchers have found a novel way
to shed light on cancer.
National Science Foundation-funded biomedical engineer,
Mingjun Zhang,
has devised a way to light up chemotherapy drugs
to track where the chemo goes and when it is released.
The team feels this advance could give patients
and their doctors information on how well
and how quickly a medication is working for them.
The Ohio State University team
first created a naturally occurring amino acid-based
biocompatible luminescent
peptide nanoparticle and hitched
it to the cancer medication.
In petri dish testing,
the self-assembled nanoparticle glowed
to a blue color to show the chemo’s release
within cells in real time.
The team found that this blue
peptide nanoparticle kept its glow
for much longer than previously used organic dyes.
Zhang said, “The better understanding
of the complex interactions
between cells and drugs
is critical to development of treatments
that are finally tuned for personalized
and precision medicine."
Animal testing is currently underway.
Deep sea exploration is getting a helping hand.
National Science Foundation-funded Baruch College marine biologist,
David Gruber, and Harvard engineer and roboticist, Robert J.
Wood, worked together to design and fabricate
two new types of soft robotic grippers.
The grippers would aid in a deep sea collection
of fragile specimens like coral and sponges
that would otherwise be destroyed by the clunky
robotic hands usually found on remotely operated vehicles.
The new grippers were designed to mimic the dexterity
and soft touch of a human diver’s hand.
The robotics were tested during a recent expedition
to the Gulf of Eilat in the northern Red Sea.
It has the world’s largest
and one of the most diverse coral reefs
and marked the first non-destructive use
of soft robotics
for sampling of fauna from the ocean floor.
The team feels this new technology
could both enhance researchers’ ability to collect samples
from largely unexplored fragile habitats
and also be useful in underwater archaeology.
For more information about these stories,
visit us at NSF.gov.
This is NSF Science Now.
I’m Dena Headlee.