Research

Renewable energy goals can A) boost infrastructure or B) cut emissions

Anonymous — Thu, 06 Dec 2018 23:44:51 +0000

Renewable energy goals can A) boost infrastructure or B) cut emissions Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/06/2018 - 16:44

While states believed Renewable Portfolio Standards would yield both environmental benefits and resource booms, researchers find that it’s one or the other

States working within our nation’s patchwork of Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) apparently can’t have their cake and eat it too, according to a recent study co-authored by a �鶹ӰԺ economics professor.

The study found that enacting such standards can generate either lots of renewable infrastructure or reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, but not both. Many states have adopted Renewable Portfolio Standards to support alternative energy and mitigate climate change.

Daniel Kaffine

“We spent some time looking at what exactly people were saying in the (state) legislatures when they passed these (RPS),” said Professor Daniel Kaffine, co-author of the research, which was published earlier this year in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.

“We saw them talking in terms of both environmental benefits and resource booms.”

RPS polices typically require that a certain percentage of a state’s power be produced by renewable energy such as wind and solar. Colorado’s RPS has a target of 30 percent renewables by 2020.

It turns out that if there is a patchwork of roughly 30 different states adopting different rules for each RPS, the different standards can result in either big resource booms—lots of renewable infrastructure—or big benefits in pollution reduction, but not both, the study states.

“And that’s a consequence of having this patchwork of RPS across different states with different resource bases and different RPS stringencies,” Kaffine said.

You can look at an RPS like a ratio, with a numerator and denominator. If the RPS increases, one way to approach that is to make the numerator bigger, increasing renewable production, but that means there will be less emissions reduction in the denominator.”

Some of that is by design, the study notes, as when Iowa developed its RPS in 1983, emphasizing the use of corn for ethanol, thus resulting in a resource boom that didn’t produce much in the way of emission reduction, but did provide economic relief during a farming crisis. New Jersey, which went for stringent renewable standards, though it doesn’t really have the sun or the wind to make it work, has seen great emission reduction, but not much in the way of a resource boom.

But the paper was not based on case studies; rather it created a general equilibrium model of an RPS policy that captures key features of the economic features that come into play. The idea, Kaffine said, was to create a model that state legislatures could use to predict the effects of their RPS.

“Essentially the question we wanted to answer is how a state’s economy would respond to an increase in RPS standards,” Kaffine said. “Given that, we set up a sort of toy model of the economy that’s all self-contained and consistent: accounting for demands of consumers and decisions made by producers.”

“You can look at an RPS like a ratio, with a numerator and denominator,” Kaffine continued. “If the RPS increases, one way to approach that is to make the numerator bigger, increasing renewable production, but that means there will be less emissions reduction in the denominator.”

That’s similar to what has transpired in Colorado. The state created new renewable resources in both solar and wind, but that resource boom hasn’t necessarily meant huge emissions reduction, as much of the power finds its way to other places on the grid or making new power available here.

That’s exactly the opposite of what has occurred in New Jersey, Kaffine said. The state ratcheted up its standards to require a certain percentage of (costly to generate) solar; a move that decreased the amount of total power produced in the state, suppliers finding other resources or consumers cutting back usage.

The paper was co-authored by economists Antonio M. Bento, a professor at the University of Southern California, and Teevrat Garg, an assistant professor at the University of California San Diego.

Kaffine said the paper went on hold for a time as the Obama Administration was working on a federal clean energy plan, but its timing today can still help states attempting to create a clean energy route of their own.

States working within our nation’s patchwork of Renewable Portfolio Standards apparently can’t have their cake and eat it too, according to a recent study.

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‘Til death do us part

Anonymous — Thu, 06 Dec 2018 18:36:17 +0000

‘Til death do us part Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/06/2018 - 11:36

Sarah Kuta

CU �鶹ӰԺ researchers find link between marriage quality and mortality

If you’ve taken the plunge, you’ve likely heard some variation of the popular marriage expression: “Happy spouse, peaceful house.”

But new research from the �鶹ӰԺ suggests that the phrase doesn’t go far enough and that the quality of your marriage may be linked to how long you live.

A trio of CU �鶹ӰԺ researchers in the psychology and neuroscience department recently set out to explore the connection between marriage quality and mortality. The findings of their study were published in the journal Health Psychology in November.

Researchers Mark Whisman, Anna Gilmour and Julia Salinger.

“We found that the odds of dying for married people who described their marriage as ‘not too happy’ was 25 percent greater than the odds of dying for people who rated their marriage as ‘very happy’ or ‘pretty happy,’” said Mark Whisman, a CU �鶹ӰԺ professor of psychology and neuroscience and the study’s lead author.

Past research has found a connection between the quality of our marriages and our physical health. In addition, other studies have measured the link between marital satisfaction and mortality in people with pre-existing conditions, such as cardiovascular disease and renal disease.

But Whisman, who also serves as the department’s associate chair for undergraduate education and director of undergraduate studies, wanted to understand whether a connection exists between relationship quality and death by any means, a “downstream” health outcome, in a sample of the general, healthy population.

To do that, Whisman and graduate students Anna Gilmour and Julia Salinger analyzed data from the General Social Survey, a long-running national survey of American households led by the University of Chicago with funding from the National Science Foundation. They focused their attention on data gathered from more than 19,000 married individuals between 1978 and 2010.

We found that the odds of dying for married people who described their marriage as ‘not too happy’ was 25 percent greater than the odds of dying for people who rated their marriage as ‘very happy’ or ‘pretty happy."

As part of the survey, these married participants were asked, “Taking things all together, how would you describe your marriage? Would you say that your marriage is very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” The participants then selected one answer to rate their relationship.

Whisman, Gilmour and Salinger linked this survey data with information from the National Death Index, a database of national mortality statistics maintained by the National Center for Health Statistics.

Even after factoring in participants’ household income and self-rated health, the results showed a connection between marriage quality and mortality rates — those who were in happier marriages had lower odds of dying than those in not-so-happy marriages. The findings seem to support past studies led by Whisman, including research that linked divorce to a biological indicator of early aging.

“Mortality is arguably the most detrimental health outcome and so even though there are a lot of studies showing that relationship quality can be impactful on less-severe health outcomes, it was really intriguing to see that we did find a significant difference even for mortality,” Gilmour said.

Because past research has found that women have more interdependent self-concepts — meaning they tend to define their identities in the context of their relationships to other people more so than men — the researchers suspected that marriage quality may be more closely linked with mortality for women. But they ultimately found no evidence of gender differences in their analysis of the data.

It’s important to note that the CU �鶹ӰԺ research showed a correlation between marriage quality and mortality, not a causal relationship, meaning that bad marriages don’t necessarily cause death, Whisman said.

The researchers pointed out that the magnitude of the association between marriage quality and mortality is similar to that of physical inactivity and mortality, which suggests that we should consider paying just as much attention to the health of our marriages as we do to hitting the gym regularly.

Everyone knows that being physically inactive is bad for your health and can lead to a reduced lifespan, but you don’t really hear doctors talking about your relationship with your partner as something you should boost to potentially live longer."

“Everyone knows that being physically inactive is bad for your health and can lead to a reduced lifespan, but you don’t really hear doctors talking about your relationship with your partner as something you should boost to potentially live longer,” said Gilmour.

Though this study didn’t examine why marriage quality is linked to mortality, Whisman said researchers have several possible explanations as to why our primary romantic relationships seem to have such a big impact on our health.

Our romantic partners can help reinforce healthy behaviors, such as eating a healthy diet and getting regular exercise, while also helping us shed bad habits. Relationships can also provide a sense of security and purpose in our lives, while at the same time buffering the effects of acute or chronic stressors, Whisman added.

In their paper, Whisman, Gilmour and Salinger called for additional research to build upon their findings and pointed out that their study has limitations. For starters, participants were only asked one question about the quality of their marriages at one point in time, meaning the researchers didn’t get a very detailed look inside their relationships, nor could they consider changes over time.

There was also no accounting of people who separated or divorced after participating in the survey, nor any measure of other relationship characteristics, such as the length of the marriage or whether the participants had been married before.

“It would be really interesting to do this study in a sample where more is asked about the relationship with the partner,” Gilmour said. “Just knowing whether someone is satisfied or not with their marriage does actually tell you a good amount, but I would be interested in knowing what particular things are actually happening in those relationships.”

Futures studies might also consider the specific biological pathways underlying the connection between marriage quality and mortality, Salinger said. In other words, what’s happening in the bodies and minds of people in both happy and unhappy marriages that could be connected to their life expectancy?

“More research on why and how this kind of psycho-social stress leads to mortality, particularly through cardiac, immune, and neuroendocrine pathways, would be informative,” Salinger said.

Future research that replicates and extends these findings could have important public health implications — doctors may be inclined to prescribe couples counseling to help lengthen their patients’ lives, for example. Until then, the researchers say their findings are an interesting addition to the growing body of research into how our romantic partnerships affect our health and wellbeing.

“It could really speak to the importance of screening couples to try to detect those who are discordant and connect them with resources in the community and therapists to try to improve their marital satisfaction with a goal of improving their health and, potentially, longevity,” Salinger said.

New research from CU �鶹ӰԺ suggests that the quality of your marriage may be linked to how long you live.

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Declining warblers making the best of bad situation

Anonymous — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 17:15:12 +0000

Declining warblers making the best of bad situation Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 12/03/2018 - 10:15

Cay Leytham-Powell

The discovery of a rare three-species warbler hybrid suggests bird species in sharp decline are struggling to find suitable mates

A strange warbler found in a Pennsylvania backyard is the first-of-its-kind three-species hybrid, indicating nearby endangered warblers might be making the best of a declining population—but at a cost, according to new research from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the �鶹ӰԺ.

With a mother that is a fertile hybrid of the Golden-winged Warbler and Blue-winged Warbler, and a father that is a Chestnut-sided Warbler, this newly found bird is one of only a few firmly documented cases of a three-species hybrid ever found, and the only known hybrid of two completely different genera (or, the biological classification above species).

The newly discovered three-species hybrid is believed to have stemmed from a mother, who was also a hybrid, and a Chestnut-Sided Warbler. Graphic by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

These findings were recently published by the journal Biology Letters.

“I don’t think we would’ve expected that across such a different part of the warbler evolutionary tree we’d still have offspring produced. They’re genetically very different birds,” said Scott Taylor, an assistant professor in ecology and evolutionary biology at CU �鶹ӰԺ and one of the study’s co-authors.

The small, vocal bird was first spotted in May 2018 by Lowell Burket, a bird watcher, on his property in Pennsylvania. Burket, who is a co-author on the study, had gotten into birding only in the last few years, and immediately noticed when he reviewed a video he took that there was something not quite right about this bird. It looked and acted like both Blue-winged and Golden-winged Warblers, but it sang like, and had minor physical characteristics of, a Chestnut-sided Warbler.

After seeing the bird a few times, he sent a photograph and video of it to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, where Taylor was previously a postdoctoral researcher. The bird immediately drew the interest of Taylor and David Toews, a fellow postdoc, as the bird was found in an area where Golden-winged Warblers have declined dramatically over the past decade.

“During fieldwork in West Virginia the previous summer, we were having these conversations about, what if Golden-winged and Blue-winged Warblers hybridize with Chestnut-sided Warblers? But we both thought that would be crazy,” said Taylor.

Scott Taylor, seen here holding a Chestnut-Sided Warbler, helped identify the three-species hybrid. Photograph courtesy of Scott Taylor.

Toews immediately went to the property and retrieved a blood sample from the bird. And, using that sample and genomic tools they had already created from Golden-winged and Blue-winged Warblers, Toews and Taylor established that this mysterious bird was indeed a three-species hybrid.

"I had literally zero knowledge about birds until seven years ago," Burket commented to the Lab of Ornithology. "And now I end up discovering what appears to be a first-of-its-kind bird. It can happen to anybody!"

While the three-species hybrid is interesting, Taylor cautions that it’s hard to say how evolutionary relevant this hybrid is to the grand scheme of warbler speciation and conservation. Rather, it might actually hurt the Golden-winged Warbler, which is up for consideration to be listed on the Endangered Species Act, and the Blue-winged Warbler’s future survival.

And this issue isn’t new. Golden-winged and Blue-winged Warblers have increasingly been hybridizing, thanks in part to a steep decline in their populations stemming from habitat loss in their wintering grounds—Venezuela and Central America.

“It’s maybe rarity of mates that caused this hybridization because the mother just couldn’t find another Blue-winged or Golden-winged to breed with, so she bred with a Chestnut-sided,” commented Taylor.

Toews agreed in a comment to Cornell: "That this hybridization occurred within a population of Golden-winged Warblers in significant decline suggests that females may be making the best of a bad situation.”

Toews and Taylor will continue monitoring this three-species hybrid going forward to see if it will try and find a mate next year, and then, if so, whether the hybrid is sterile or fertile.

The discovery of a rare three-species warbler hybrid suggests bird species in sharp decline are struggling to find suitable mates.

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Think the Bible is fully understood? CU scholar begs to differ

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Nov 2018 18:15:10 +0000

Think the Bible is fully understood? CU scholar begs to differ Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/28/2018 - 11:15

Sarah Kuta

In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Sam Boyd, a CU �鶹ӰԺ scholar of Biblical studies, dove into the study of religious texts ‘so I know what I’m talking about’

When he tells people about his research, Sam Boyd is often met with perplexed looks and questions. But why are you studying the Bible? Don’t we know everything there is to know already?

But the University of Colorado faculty member simply smiles and explains that while the Bible is extremely popular — it’s the world’s best-selling book of all time — it’s still ripe for exploration.

Sam Boyd

“The answer is always, ‘No, we know next to nothing about it still,’” said Boyd, an assistant professor of religious studies and Jewish studies.

Perhaps that’s why Boyd, who also serves as the director of undergraduate studies for the Program in Jewish Studies, is such a productive scholar — he’s driven by an intense curiosity and the desire to solve what he describes as a “really interesting, sophisticated puzzle” in understanding the Bible.

Case in point, he’s in the process of writing his second book, which is based on an article being published in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies this spring about the Tower of Babel passage in the book of Genesis. This year, he was also a member of the inaugural cohort of fellows in the Research and Innovation Office, a prestigious new program that seeks to build and enhance scholarly leadership across campus.

Beyond that, fellow professors say Boyd is a congenial colleague who is dedicated to service within the department and building bridges to other disciplines. As a teacher, Boyd is “inspiring and challenging,” forcing students to think critically about widely accepted views of the Bible, said David Shneer, chair of the religious studies department.

This well-rounded faculty member, who became CU’s first Biblical scholar when he arrived in the fall of 2015, is already considered a rising star in his department and across the campus at large.

“He’s unbelievable, and we’re really, really lucky to have him,” said Nan Goodman, director of the Program in Jewish Studies. “He’s really ramped up the intellectual rigor of the department, both for the students and among his colleagues. His scholarship is meticulous and innovative and he has really shed a huge amount of light on what the Bible is as a text.”

Boyd didn’t always want to become a professor — in fact, when he was a kid, he dreamt of growing up to be Indiana Jones. He studied economics and American history as an undergraduate at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and was working at a bank when a series of conversations caused him to rethink his career path entirely.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Boyd remembers having happy hour debates with his coworkers about Christianity, Islam and other religions. But for Boyd, these after after-work conversations went much deeper.

“I thought, ‘I should go read these texts so I know what I’m talking about’ and I just got hooked — that’s what led me on this journey,” he said.

He earned a master of divinity from Westminster Theological Seminary before earning his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2014. Today, he uses more than 20 languages to study ancient texts and gain a better understanding of the conversations Biblical scribes were having with the world around them through their writing.

“The basic question I ask is, ‘Where did the Bible come from? Why did people start writing it?’” he said. “People think of the Bible as just a book you pull off the shelf at Barnes & Noble and it’s always kind of looked like this, and that’s not the case.”

Though religion can be a polarizing issue, Boyd has made a point of reaching out to pastors, rabbis and imams in Colorado to introduce himself since arriving at CU �鶹ӰԺ from Chicago three years ago. He said he hopes his work can help spark a constructive dialogue that transcends political and religious differences.

“I am not out to tell people whether God exists or whether there’s one or many gods or whether God is a man or a woman — that is not what I do,” he said. “I’m interested in the people walking around in the ancient Near East whose thought is reflected in what becomes the Bible, the very real issues of what it means to be human in the world.”

Because interpretations of Bible passages are referenced so frequently in popular culture, political discourse and everyday conversations, Boyd and his colleagues say they believe it’s more important than ever to understand what this book actually says.

“Whether it’s the attack on the synagogue in Pittsburgh or whether it’s our presidential election, it’s important for us to get it right and be responsible with it, whether we’re religious or not,” Boyd said.

The topic of his forthcoming journal article and book provides a perfect example of why Boyd’s research into ancient Biblical texts is so relevant today.

Traditionally, the Tower of Babel story has been interpreted like this: People attempted to build a tower that reached heaven, but were stymied when God caused them to speak different languages and scattered them across the earth.

In the modern era, politicians and pundits have used this interpretation in debates about immigration reform, arguing that multilingualism is a sign of God’s curse and should be avoided at all costs; a similar interpretation also appears in literature and art. For example, Pat Buchanan, who unsuccessfully ran for president three times in the 1990s and early 2000s, has cited the Tower of Babel story to argue against multiculturalism in America. Bobby Jindal, the former Louisiana governor who made an unsuccessful 2016 presidential bid, used “Tower of Babel” to criticize Democrats’ love of diversity in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

But based on his analysis of the syntax and the order of Biblical chapters, Boyd argues that the story is not about language at all.

“When we take the Tower of Babel story and put it in its ancient Near Eastern context … Syrian kings would talk about ‘one mouth’ as a political metaphor,” Boyd said. “It had nothing to do with everyone speaking the same language, but was about political unification and fragmentation against authority. And boy, if we’ve gotten that story wrong, that has a big impact on people’s political metaphors, a big impact on art history, on literature.”

In essence, much of Boyd’s research can fundamentally change the way we think about the Bible and call into question long-held notions about morality, human behavior, diversity and other topics.

These types of research revelations from Boyd consistently impressed the 12 other inaugural Research and Innovation Office faculty fellows, a cohort of early to mid-career tenured and tenure-track professors who were identified as leaders in research, collaboration and systems thinking.

The first group of participants in the new program spent 2018 forming cross-campus relationships, improving and developing leadership skills, setting professional goals and discussing the significance of their roles within the university community and in society at large. The second cohort will begin the fellowship in January 2019.

“Most of the faculty in the program were mesmerized whenever Sam spoke because he had such a breadth of understanding of humanity and history through his studies of the Bible,” said Kirsten Rowell, program director for the fellowship program. “We had a really broad group of intellects in the program, and we were all thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I need to understand more.’”

In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Sam Boyd, a CU �鶹ӰԺ scholar of Biblical studies, dove into the study of religious texts ‘so I know what I’m talking about.’

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Barn swallows may indeed have evolved alongside barns, humans

Anonymous — Tue, 30 Oct 2018 15:57:07 +0000

Barn swallows may indeed have evolved alongside barns, humans Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/30/2018 - 09:57

Cay Leytham-Powell

As humans evolved and expanded, so too did barn swallows, new research from CU �鶹ӰԺ suggests

The evolution of barn swallows, a bird ubiquitous to bridges and sheds around the world, might be even more closely tied to humans than previously thought, according to new study from the �鶹ӰԺ.

Chris Smith (left) and Rebecca Safran (right) re-examined the evolution of barn swallows and found that they may indeed have evolved alongside barns. Photographs courtesy of Rebecca Safran and Patrick Campbell/�鶹ӰԺ.

The research, published this week in Molecular Ecology, offers preliminary insight suggesting that the barn swallow and its subspecies evolved alongside—but independently from—humans. These new results make it one of the only known species, in addition to microscopic organisms like bacteria or viruses, to have developed in such a way, upending previous assumptions that barn swallows evolved prior to human settlement.

“Humans could be a really big part of the story,” said Rebecca Safran, a co-author of the study and an ecology and evolutionary biology (EBIO) associate professor at CU �鶹ӰԺ. “There’s very few studies that can point to the exact influence of humans, and so here, this coincidence of human expansion and permanent settlement and the expansion of a group that relies really, really heavily on humans is compelling.”

Barn swallows are found across the northern hemisphere and are characterized by their mud-cup nests that are built nearly exclusively on human-made structures. Despite their prevalence, however, not much is known about their evolutionary history, the timing of their expansion from northern Africa (where they originated) or how the six subspecies evolved so physically and behaviorally different yet remain almost genetically identical.

Previous studies published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London and Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution looked into these questions and found that the different subspecies split early, well before human settlement.

This new study, however, gave the topic a fresh look by examining the whole genome of 168 barn swallows from the two sub-species farthest apart on an evolutionary scale: H. r. savignii in Egypt (a non-migratory species that lives along the Nile) and H. r. erythrogaster in North America (a species found throughout North America that migrates seasonally to South America).

Barn swallow subspecies are found throughout the northern hemisphere. Barn Swallow illustrations courtesy of Hilary Burn, and map courtesy of the Safran lab.

These data—which are on the order of 100,000 times bigger than the previous dataset used—were then analyzed with more sophisticated computational resources and methods than previously available. This allowed researchers to get a more complete picture that places the timing of barn swallow differentiation or speciation (i.e., when the barn swallow subspecies separated) closer to that of when humans began to build structures and settlements.

“The previous studies were playing with the idea of potential impact on population sizes due to humans,” said Chris Smith, a graduate student in EBIO and the Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology program, and the study’s lead author. “Our results suggest a much more substantial link with humans.”

These new preliminary findings also suggest that this evolutionary link may have been forged through a “founder event,” which is when a small number of individuals in a species take over a new environment and are able to expand their new population there thanks to an availability of resources and an absence of competitors. For barn swallows, this event may have occurred rapidly when they moved into a new, relatively empty environment: alongside humans.

“Everyone is always wondering how do you study speciation? It’s been viewed as this long-term, million-year (process), but in barn swallows, we are not talking about differentiation within several thousands of years,” said Safran. “Things are really unfolding rather rapidly.”

Smith concurred: “It’s interesting to study speciation in the beginning steps.”

Top photograph courtesy of fishhawk/Flickr.

As humans evolved and expanded, so too did barn swallows, new research from CU �鶹ӰԺ suggests

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