Sea-level rise predictions

A team of University of Idaho scientists is studying a fast-moving glacier in Alaska in hopes of developing better predictions on how quickly global sea levels will rise.

Tim Bartholomaus, a professor in the Department of Geography and Geological Sciences, spent several weeks on Turner Glacier in Alaska’s southeastern 【小题1】 near Disenchantment Bay. The glacier is unique because, unlike other glaciers, it rises greatly every five to eight years.

A surging glacier is defined, 【小题2】, as one that starts flowing at least 10 times faster than normal. But the how and why of that glacial movement is poorly understood, although recent research suggests that global climate change increases the 【小题3】 of glacial surging.

During Turner’s surges, the mass of ice and rock will increase its speed from roughly 3 feet a day to 65 feet per day.

All of that is important because glaciers falling into the ocean are a major contributor to sea level rise, and current climate change models don’t 【小题4】 account for these movements. For example, Greenland’s glaciers are one of the leading contributors to global sea-level rise. Since the early 2000s, Greenland 【小题5】 from not having any effect on world sea levels, to increasing sea level by about 1 millimeter per year. Half of that yearly increase is due to warmer average temperatures, which leads to more ice melting. The other half, however, is because glaciers in Greenland are, as a whole, moving faster and running into the ocean more frequently.

Glacial movement has something to do with water running underneath the glacier. Glaciers are full of holes, and water runs through those holes. When the water pressure is high underneath a glacier, it starts to move, partly because it’s lifting the mass of ice and rock off the ground and partly because it’s 【小题6】 the underside of the glacier.

But how exactly does that water move through the glacier, and how does the movement 【小题7】 the glacier’s speed? Those are the questions the scientists hope to answer.

Bartholomaus, some graduate students and researchers from Boise State University, 【小题8】 onto the ice in August. They set up a base camp at the toe of the glacier and spent their days flying in on helicopters. They placed roughly 30 instruments, burying them deeply into the glacier and 【小题9】 them on rock outcroppings (露岩) alongside the glacier. This summer the team will return to get the instruments and replace batteries. Those instruments will 【小题10】 on and around the glacier until the glacier surge stops, providing researchers with before and after data.

Professor Mayer, 【小题1】 by many as a leading expert in the study of changes to People's EQs, recently【小题2】the findings of a study on senior high school students. When some normal students were 【小题3】to some disabled students, they found that afterwards they were more willing to help people in difficulties. They also showed a better understanding of the disabled students' feelings. At the same time, there was a【小题4】 change in the disabled students' attitudes. They became more positive about their disabilities and were more 【小题5】to try new things. People with high EQs often have positive attitudes towards life and open minds to different ideas.

Honey Bees Remember Happy and Sad Times

While the brains of honey bees are tiny, the insects are capable of some surprisingly advanced thinking. A study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society has now cast new 【小题1】 on the insect’s cognitive abilities.

A team of researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found that honey bees can remember positive and negative 【小题2】 — such as taking care of their young or fending off an enemy. These memories are stored in specific areas of their brains, according to how good or bad they are.

Scientists have long known that vertebrates — animals with tail bones — like ourselves are capable of sorting memories of pleasure and pain in 【小题3】 brain areas such as this. However, this has never been documented before in the minds of bees.

“We found that bees 【小题4】 different parts of their brain to processing social information that is either negative or positive,” Gene Robinson, an author of the study, told Newsweek. This discovery is 【小题5】given how small their brains are; we did not expect such spatial separation of social information of different valence. Valence is a term used in psychology when discussing emotions to refer to the intrinsic (内在的) positivity or negativity of an event, object, or situation.

In the study, the researchers looked at regions of the honey bee brain that’s 【小题6】 in other invertebrates (非脊柱动物), referred to as “mushroom bodies,” which are associated with sensory processing, learning and memory. They 【小题7】 the expressions of genes following aggressive or collaborative social interactions, demonstrating that different parts of the these mushroom bodies were specially activated depending on the valence of the interaction — in other words, whether the interaction was harmful or 【小题8】.

“These findings can help us better understand ‘biological embedding (嵌入),’ or how social information ‘gets under skin’ to affect the behavior,’ he said. “Biological embedding is an important issue in understanding health and 【小题9】 in humans.”

Furthermore, because the type of memory that the researchers documented is 【小题10】 in the brains of vertebrates, the latest findings demonstrated a link between vertebrate and invertebrate cognition despite the two animal groups diverging (分岔) in evolutionary terms around 600 million years ago.