Now, a new study from Simon Fraser University has given scientists the clearest picture yet when the giant mammals roamed Vancouver Island.

As part of SFU researcher Laura Termes’ PhD and published earlier this month in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, the study examined 32 suspected mammoth samples collected on Vancouver Island. Of those samples, just 16 were deemed suitable for radiocarbon dating.

The youngest sample was found to be around 23,000 years old and the oldest turned out to be beyond the range radiocarbon dating could measure, meaning it was older than 45,000 years.

Prior to the study, only two mammoth remains found on Vancouver Island had ever been dated before. Both lived around 21,000 years ago, so the Termes’ study provides a greater understanding of when the massive mammals lived in the area.

“This is really exciting because it shows that mammoths have lived on Vancouver Island for a long time,” says Termes, a PhD candidate in the Department of Archaeology. “We were expecting similar results [to the two samples previously dated] but what we found were mammoths that were much older. It is fantastic that they could be preserved for that long.”

Termes says having the curatorial support at the Royal BC Museum and the Courtenay and District Museum and Palaeontology Centre allowing access to their collections was invaluable to the study.

“This research highlights the important role of museum collections for understanding how life has evolved and changed in British Columbia’s deep history,” says Victoria Arbour, curator of palentology at the Royal BC Museum. “It’s great to see Woolly’s relatives in the Royal BC Museum’s collections in the spotlight through this research study.”

The UBC ADaPT Facility (which was instrumental in helping determine if samples were indeed mammoths and not whales or other animals) also played an important role in the research, Termes says.

And archaeologists need all the help they can get because while mammoths were enormous, finding intact samples in British Columbia is actually quite rare.

“When we imagine great big giant animals of the last ice age being found, we might have imagined fully articulated and complete skeletons being systematically excavated. But in southern B.C., that simply does not happen,” says Termes. “Instead, we may get an isolated molar that’s been tumbled around in the water for a long time, or maybe a piece of a tusk. And these are what everyday people are encountering.”

For example, one sample she examined was a piece of mammoth tooth found by a child in the gravel at a local playground.

“So maybe it’s a dog owner, taking their puppy for a walk on a rainy day, or a gravel pit operator at work,” says Termes, who grew up in Qualicum Beach. “I really like how these magnificent animals are finding their way into people’s lives in routine and everyday ways.”

Termes says the study is part of a larger look at megafauna in B.C. and she plans on radiocarbon dating mammoth samples from other parts of the province.

In a groundbreaking study published Aug. 7 in Science Advances, researchers from the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Central Florida have proposed a revolutionary approach towards terraforming Mars. This new method, using engineered dust particles released to the atmosphere, could potentially warm the Red Planet by more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit, to temperatures suitable for microbial life — a crucial first step towards making Mars habitable.

The proposed method is over 5,000 times more efficient than previous schemes to globally warm Mars, representing a significant leap forward in our ability to modify the Martian environment.

What sets this approach apart is its use of resources readily available on Mars, making it far more feasible than earlier proposals that relied on importing materials from Earth or mining rare Martian resources.

This strategy would take decades. But it appears logistically easier than other plans proposed so far.

“This suggests that the barrier to warming Mars to allow liquid water is not as high as previously thought,” said Edwin Kite, an associate professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago and corresponding author on the study. The lead author was Samaneh Ansari, a graduate student in Prof. Hooman Mohseni’s group at Northwestern University.

Astronauts still won’t be able to breathe Mars’ thin air; making the planet suitable for humans to walk on the surface unaided requires much more work. But perhaps groundwork could be laid, by making the planet habitable for microbes and food crops that could gradually add oxygen to the atmosphere — much as they have done for Earth during its geologic history.

A new approach to an age-old dream

There is a rich history of proposals to make Mars habitable; Carl Sagan himself came up with one back in 1971. These have ranged from outright daydreams, such as science fiction writers depicting turning one of Mars’ moons into a sun, to more recent and scientifically plausible ideas, such as engineering transparent gel tiles to trap heat.

Any plan to make Mars habitable must address several hurdles, including deadly UV rays and salty soil. But the biggest is the planet’s temperature; the surface of Mars averages about -80 degrees Fahrenheit.

One strategy to warm the planet could be the same method that humans are unintentionally using here on Earth: releasing material into the atmosphere, which would enhance Mars’ natural greenhouse effect, trapping solar heat at the surface.

The trouble is that you would need tons of these materials — literally. Previous schemes depended on bringing gases from Earth to Mars, or attempting to mine Mars for a large mass of ingredients that aren’t very common there — both are costly and difficult propositions. But the team wondered whether it could be done by processing materials that already exist abundantly on Mars.

We know from rovers like Curiosity that dust on Mars is rich in iron and aluminum. By themselves, those dust particles aren’t suitable to warm the planet; their size and composition mean they tend to cool the surface slightly rather than warm it. But if we engineered dust particles that had different shapes or compositions, the researchers hypothesized, perhaps they could trap heat more efficiently.

The researchers designed particles shaped like short rods — similar in size to commercially available glitter. These particles are designed to trap escaping heat and scatter sunlight towards the surface, enhancing Mars’ natural greenhouse effect.

“How light interacts with sub-wavelength objects is fascinating. Importantly, engineering

nanoparticles can lead to optical effects that far exceed what is conventionally expected from

such small particles,” said Ansari. Mohseni, who is a co-author, believes that they have just scratched the surface: “We believe it is possible to design nanoparticles with higher efficiency, and even those that can dynamically change their optical properties.”

“You’d still need millions of tons to warm the planet, but that’s five thousand times less than you would need with previous proposals to globally warm Mars,” said Kite. “This significantly increases the feasibility of the project.”

Calculations indicate that if the particles were released into Mars’ atmosphere continuously at 30 liters per second, the planet would warm by more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit — and the effect could be noticeable within as soon as months. Similarly, the warming would be reversible, stopping within a few years if release was switched off.

Potential impact and future research

Much work remains to be done, the scientists said. We don’t know exactly how fast the engineered dust would cycle out of Mars’ atmosphere, for example. Mars does have water and clouds, and, as the planet warms, it’s possible that water would increasingly start to condense around the particles and fall back to the surface as rain.

“Climate feedbacks are really difficult to model accurately,” Kite cautioned. “To implement something like this, we would need more data from both Mars and Earth, and we’d need to proceed slowly and reversibly to ensure the effects work as intended.”

While this method represents a significant leap forward in terraforming research, the researchers emphasize that the study focuses on warming Mars to temperatures suitable for microbial life and possibly growing food crops — not on creating a breathable atmosphere for humans.

“This research opens new avenues for exploration and potentially brings us one step closer to the long-held dream of establishing a sustainable human presence on Mars,” said Kite.

Ansari is the lead author of the study. Other coauthors of the study were Ramses Ramirez of the University of Central Florida and Liam Steele, formerly a postdoctoral researcher at UChicago, now with the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

The authors used the Quest high-performance computing facility at Northwestern and the University of Chicago Research Computing Center.

With a goal of understanding and addressing immunotherapy’s limitations, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis have found that the immune system can be its own worst enemy in the fight against cancer. In a new study in mice, a subset of immune cells — type 1 regulatory T cells, or Tr1 cells — did its normal job of preventing the immune system from overreacting but did so while inadvertently restraining immunotherapy’s cancer-fighting power.

“Tr1 cells were found to be a heretofore unrecognized obstacle to immunotherapy’s effectiveness against cancer,” said senior author Robert D. Schreiber, PhD, the Andrew M. and Jane M. Bursky Distinguished Professor in the Department of Pathology & Immunology, and director of the Bursky Center for Human Immunology & Immunotherapy at Washington University School of Medicine. “By removing or circumventing that barrier in mice, we successfully reenergized the immune system’s cancer-fighting cells and uncovered an opportunity to expand the benefits of immunotherapy for more cancer patients.”

The study is available in Nature.

Cancer vaccines represent a new approach to personalize cancer immunotherapy. Aimed at the mutant proteins specific to a patient’s tumor, such vaccines induce killer T cells to attack tumor cells while leaving healthy cells unharmed. Schreiber’s group previously showed that more effective vaccines also activate helper T cells, another immune cell type, that recruit and expand additional killer T cells to destroy the tumors. But when they tried to add increased amounts of the helper T cell target to supercharge the vaccine they found they generated a different type of T cell that inhibited rather than promoted tumor rejection.

“We tested the hypothesis that by increasing helper T cell activation we would induce enhanced elimination of the sarcoma tumors in mice,” said first author Hussein Sultan, PhD, an instructor in pathology & immunology. So he injected groups of tumor bearing mice with vaccines that activated killer T cells equally while triggering a different degree of helper T cell activation.

Much to the researchers’ surprise in this latest study, the vaccine meant to hyperactivate helper T cells produced the opposite effect and inhibited tumor rejection.

“We thought that more helper T cell activation would optimize elimination of the sarcoma tumors in mice,” Sultan said. “Instead, we found that vaccines containing high doses of helper T cell targets induced inhibitory Tr1 cells that completely blocked tumor elimination. We know that Tr1 cells normally control an overactive immune system, but this is the first time they have been shown to dampen its fight against cancer.”

Tr1 cells normally put the brakes on the immune system to prevent it from attacking the body’s healthy cells. But their role in cancer has not been seriously explored. Looking through previously published data, the researchers found that tumors from patients who had responded poorly to immunotherapy had more Tr1 cells compared with tumors of patients who had responded well. The number of Tr1 cells also increased in mice as tumors grew bigger, rendering the mice insensitive to immunotherapy.

To bypass the inhibiting cells, the researchers treated the vaccinated mice with a drug that enhances killer T cells’ fighting power. The drug, developed by biotechnology startup Asher Biotherapeutics, carries modifications in the immune-boosting protein called interleukin 2 (IL-2) that specifically revs up killer T cells and reduces the toxicity of unmodified IL-2 treatments. The additional boost from the drug overcame Tr1 cells’ inhibition and rendered the immunotherapy more effective.

“We are committed to personalizing immunotherapy and broadening its effectiveness,” said Schreiber. “Decades of researching basic tumor immunology have expanded our understanding of how to trigger the immune system to achieve the most robust antitumor response. This new study adds to our understanding of how to improve immunotherapy to benefit more people.”

As co-founder of Asher Biotherapeutics — which provided the mouse version of the modified IL-2 drugs — Schreiber is indirectly involved in the company’s clinical trials testing the human version of the drug as a monotherapy in cancer patients. If successful, the drug has the potential to be tested in combination with cancer treatment vaccines.

To help protect drivers and machine operators from the dangers of drifting off, engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have created prototype earbuds that can detect the signs of drowsiness in the brain.

The earbuds detect brain waves in the same way as an electroencephalogram (EEG), a test that doctors use to measure electrical activity in the brain. While most EEGs detect brain waves using a series of electrodes attached to the head, the earbuds do so using built-in electrodes that are designed to make contact with the ear canal.

The electrical signals detected by the ear buds are smaller than those picked up by a traditional EEG. However, in a new study, the researchers show that their Ear EEG platform is sensitive enough to detect alpha waves, a pattern of brain activity that increases when you close your eyes or start to fall asleep.

“I was inspired when I bought my first pair of Apple’s AirPods in 2017. I immediately thought, ‘What an amazing platform for neural recording,'” said study senior author Rikky Muller, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley. “We believe that this technology has many potential uses, and that classifying drowsiness is a good indicator that the technology can be used to classify sleep and even diagnose sleep disorders.”

Using an earbud as an EEG electrode poses a variety of practical challenges. In order to obtain an accurate EEG, electrodes need to make good contact with the skin. This is relatively easy to achieve in traditional EEGs, which use flat metal electrodes stuck to the scalp. However, it is much trickier to design an earbud that will fit snugly — and comfortably — in a wide variety of ear sizes and shapes.

When Muller’s team started working on the project, other groups developing Ear EEG platforms were either using wet electrode gels to ensure a good seal between the earbud and the ear canal, or creating custom-molded earpieces for each individual user. She and her team wanted to design a model that was dry and user generic, so that anyone could stick them in their ears and get reliable readings.

“My personal goal was to try to make a device that could be used every day by someone who would really benefit from it,” said Ryan Kaveh, a UC Berkeley postdoctoral scholar and co-first author of the study. “In order to do that, I knew that it would have to be reusable, fit a variety of people, and [be] easy to manufacture.”

Kaveh co-led the study with graduate student Carolyn Schwendeman and collaborated with Ana Arias’s lab at UC Berkeley to design the final earpiece in three sizes: small, medium and large. The earpiece incorporates multiple electrodes in a cantilevered design that applies gentle outward pressure to the ear canal and uses flexible electronics to ensure a comfortable fit. The signals are read out through a custom, low-power, wireless electronic interface.

In a 2020 paper, the researchers showed that these earpieces can detect a number of physiological signals, including eye blinks, alpha brain waves and the auditory steady-state response, which is the brain’s response to hearing a steady pitch. In the new study, they improved the earpiece design and incorporated machine learning to demonstrate how the earpieces could be used in a real-world application.

As part of the experiment, they asked nine volunteers to wear the earpieces while doing a series of boring tasks in a darkened room. Every so often, the volunteers were asked to rate their level of drowsiness, and their response times were measured.

“We found that even when the signal quality from the earpieces seemed worse, we could still classify the onset of drowsiness with the same level of accuracy as much more complicated, bulky systems,” Kaveh said. The earpieces also retain their accuracy when categorizing drowsiness in brand-new users, a characteristic of devices that could work ‘out of the box’.

Muller, who developed the Ear EEG with the support of the Bakar Fellowship and the Bakar Prize, is continuing to refine the design and explore other potential applications of the device, which can also record signals beyond EEG, such as heart beats, eye movements and jaw clenches.

“Wireless earbuds are something we already wear all the time,” Muller said. “That’s what makes Ear EEG such a compelling approach to wearables. It doesn’t require anything extra.”

This study was supported in part by the Ford University Research Program and a Bakar Spark Award.

A recent study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Pretoria in South Africa demonstrates how African conservation managers could create and optimize elephant movement corridors across a seven-country region. The study offers a map showing landscape connections that would support elephants’ habitat needs and allow for more gene flow among populations.

“Other research groups have integrated genetic and spatial data before, but usually it’s done on a more local scale. Ours was the first to combine both types of data for southern African elephants across such a large geographic area,” said lead author Alida de Flamingh, who completed the study as part of her doctoral program in the Department of Animal Sciences, part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at Illinois. She is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology.

Scale is meaningful because African elephants have very large home ranges — roaming up to 11,000 square kilometers, or more than 2.7 million acres — and they often travel long distances out of their way to avoid unsuitable habitat. Capturing that scale in a single analysis was no easy feat.

“This was a massive effort. We went out with our partners in the Conservation Ecology Research Unit at the University of Pretoria to collect non-invasive DNA samples from elephant dung across the whole range,” de Flamingh said. “CERU also contributed data from GPS trackers on 80 collared elephants across nearly 54,000 locations.”

GPS collar data shows how elephants move across the landscape but can’t indicate whether that movement leads to gene flow. Conversely, DNA data documents gene flow, but can’t show how elephants moved to make that happen. Integrating the two data sets required a landscape genetics approach.

“Landscape genetics adapts some ideas from electrical circuit theory to discuss how animals might move and achieve gene flow. Our approach looks at resistances or costs elephants encounter as they move along multiple pathways through the region, accounting for the possibility of losing or gaining individual paths,” said co-author Nathan Alexander, a postdoctoral researcher at the Illinois Natural History Survey. Alexander worked on the project during his doctoral program in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences in ACES.

Costs in this case included steep slopes, barren areas with little to no vegetation, densely populated human settlements, and areas far from water. The researchers combined these environmental challenges with DNA data to explain how elephants might navigate their habitat, identifying key routes to maintain gene flow across protected areas.

“We did not find a simple linear relationship where more suitable habitats are less costly. Instead, we found a pronounced nonlinear pattern where the least suitable habitats have the biggest impact on elephant movement or distribution across the landscape,” de Flamingh said. “Intermediate habitats aren’t necessarily dictating their movements as much as these really, really unsuitable habitats. That’s positive, if you think about it. They’re tolerant of intermediate habitats and can still move through them.”

What qualifies as a “really, really unsuitable” habitat? The researchers identified areas like the vegetation-free Makgadikgadi salt pans in Botswana, as well as densely populated human settlements. Providing connections for elephants that avoid these areas will also reduce human-elephant conflict, a distinct threat to elephants.

De Flamingh said the insights gained from this study can help governmental authorities and NGOs in southern Africa to develop robust conservation initiatives on the ground.

“Southern Africa has the largest number of elephants in all of Africa. So any conservation efforts there, especially those that avoid human-elephant conflict, would protect pretty large populations of elephants,” said senior author Al Roca, an animal sciences professor in ACES. “Our partners at CERU, as well as our funders — the International Fund for Animal Welfare and the African Elephant Conservation Fund of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — are really critical in those efforts.”

The study, “Integrating habitat suitability modeling with gene flow improves delineation of landscape connections among African savanna elephants,” is published in Biodiversity and Conservation. The paper is dedicated to the memory of co-author Rudi van Aarde, who was instrumental in launching the study as head of CERU, and who passed away while the research was ongoing.

Roca is also affiliated with the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, the Illinois Natural History Survey, and the School of Information Sciences at Illinois.