Peter McMahon

U of T chemistry team advances to ‘close the carbon cycle’

rasbachn — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 19:28:18 +0000

U of T chemistry team advances to ‘close the carbon cycle’

rasbachn Wed, 11/15/2017 - 14:28

Cutline

Closing the carbon cycle by U of T's Geoffrey Ozin: The diorama will open in December at Austria’s Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna (photo by Peter Weibel)

Peter McMahon

Topic

Global Lens

Energy

Faculty of Arts & Science

Subheadline

Solar fuel breakthroughs showcased in new art exhibit in Vienna

Making fuel out of polluted air, using it to power industry, and then taking the emissions from that industry back out of the air to create more fuel – it sounds too good to be true. But while there are a few hurdles to clear, a team led by University of Toronto’s Geoffrey Ozin of the department of chemistry in the Faculty of Arts & Science is getting closer to closing the carbon cycle.

“Carbon dioxide's so frustrating because it's the most stable molecule on the planet,” says University Professor Ozin of the climate pollutant that outlives soot, methane and hydrofluorocarbons by a long shot.

“That's the problem. Anything you burn becomes CO2 and CO2 is really good at staying CO2,” says Ozin, who holds the Canada Research Chair of materials chemistry and nanochemistry.

For the last five years, Ozin has led a multidisciplinary team known as the U of T Solar Fuels Cluster on a quest to develop a process to convert atmospheric CO2 into a renewable fuel. Ozin says his plan for manufacturing the fuel would take as much carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as burning the fuel would put back in.

This photomontage unites the vision of a global CO2 utilization strategy with a fuel synthesis plant that enables closing the carbon cycle (image courtesy of Todd Siler and Geoffrey Ozin, Matthias Gommel and Peter Weibel, “GLOBALE: Exo-Evolution” exhibition at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe)

The team’s efforts have attracted the attention of major international corporations, and even inspired an exhibit about the process that’s been on display in Germany – a world leader in CO2 reclamation – and more recently in Austria.

The quest to make fuel out of waste carbon isn't new, but Ozin and his team are the only ones using both the heat and light of the sun to convert CO2, hoping their process will be more efficient than anyone else’s.

Recently, Ozin’s work caught the eye of the director of the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, which specializes in multimedia exhibits at the confluence of art and science. The result was a vivid diorama depicting Ozin’s vision that has met with acclaim in Karlsruhe and will open in December at Austria’s Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna.

It is not the first time Ozin’s research has been immortalized in art. In 2011, American artist Todd Siler began creating multimetre-tall abstract sculptures of Ozin’s nano-structures, showing them in such places as the Armory Show, New York City’s premier art fair.

“There were human-sized nano rods, sheets, self-assembly, applications in energy, climate change,” says Ozin. “I lost my voice by the end of the week explaining it to all the visitors. We got two main comments: 'I like the colours' and 'What the hell does it all mean?'”

Ozin is currently working with a dozen U of T fourth-year chemical engineering students to design and build a pilot-scale version of his laboratory demonstration 'solar refinery’ connected to U of T's physical plant.

"There are different ways of doing this and maybe different methods will be more useful in some parts of the world than others,” says Ozin. “Some places have more wind, some places are sunnier, some have more water,” he says. “Everybody's pushing their method to valorize CO2 capture and conversion and when the public sees someone holding a gallon of gasoline that's been pulled out of thin air, that's going to shake them up.

“If you want to do this on a gigaton-scale, the way that we're doing it is the way to go.”

How Ozin’s ‘photoreactors’ would create a carbon-neutral cycle:

Renewable electricity is used to drive current through water, teasing out hydrogen gas that can be used to provide a feed stock for reaction with CO2.
Renewable energy captures CO2 – for example, from high CO2-emission sources such as power stations, steel and cement factories, or even from dilute CO2 sources in air.
Once captured into the reactor, sunlight starts to drive the conversion of hydrogen and CO2 when it comes into contact with catalysts made of nano-structured metal oxides and composites with nano-scale metals or other nano-scale metal oxides engineered by Ozin and team.
Ultra black in colour, the surface of these nano-catalysts absorbs more than 90 per cent of the sunlight spectrum – from ultraviolet to visible to infrared wavelengths – driving thermo- and photochemical reactions that turn CO2 and hydrogen gas into synthetic fuels.
“When a black nano-material absorbs light, it gets very hot at the nano-scale, so you get very high local temperatures at the surface of these nano materials,” says Ozin. “So I don't need fossil fuels to drive the conversion. With just the sun, I can get 500 C at the nano-scale because the heat builds up as vibrational or electronic energy, confined to the surface of the catalyst nanoparticles where the CO2 chemical conversion to synthetic fuels is occurring. That's photothermal catalysis – it utilizes wavelengths of the incident light across the entire solar spectrum to transform CO2 to synthetic fuels – and it is a process we have patented."
Depending on the composition and structure of these catalysts, as well as the reaction conditions – temperature and pressure – the fuel material created can be tailored to produce carbon monoxide, methane or methanol, potentially ready for use in engines, buildings, factories and more.
Ozin says all of this is a way to make the catalysts more efficient. “If we can be half a per cent more efficient than everyone else, that's a big deal when you're dealing in hundreds of millions of tons,” he says. “If you can drive it all through sunlight, that's new. And if you can drive the surface reaction chemistry through light, that's our contribution.”

Certainty with complex scientific research an unachievable goal: U of T study

ullahnor — Mon, 16 Jan 2017 18:46:56 +0000

Certainty with complex scientific research an unachievable goal: U of T study

ullahnor Mon, 01/16/2017 - 13:46

Cutline

Researcher looked at data – from the mass of an electron to the carbon dating of a sample – and found anomalous observations happened up to 100,000 times more often than expected (photo by janneke staaks via Flickr)

Peter McMahon

Author legacy

Peter McMahon

Topic

Breaking Research

Research & Innovation

Physics

Faculty of Arts & Science

Subheadline

Physics professor says study can help researchers better analyze their data and encourage more realistic expectations by both scientists and the public about the accuracy of scientific research

A University of Toronto study on uncertainty in scientific research could shed light on anomalies that arose in early attempts to discover the Higgs boson or even in predicting the outcome of the recent U.S. presidential election.

Published this week in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the study suggests that research in some of the more complex scientific disciplines, such as medicine or particle physics, often doesn’t eliminate uncertainties to the extent we might expect.

“This is due to a tendency to underestimate the chance of significant abnormalities in results,” said study author David Bailey, a physics professor in the Faculty of Arts & Science.

He believes his study can help researchers better analyze their data, motivate more care with results and encourage more realistic expectations by both scientists and the public about the accuracy of scientific research.

“These insights can be beneficial given the inherently complex nature of scientific research,” Bailey said. “But the chance of avoiding being wrong in some way on some level is almost impossible.”

Looking at 41,000 measurements of 3,200 quantities – from the mass of an electron to the carbon dating of a sample – Bailey found that anomalous observations happened up to 100,000 times more often than expected.

“The chance of large differences does not fall off exponentially as you’d expect in a normal bell curve,” Bailey said.

A long tail of uncertainty

“The study shows that researchers in many fields do a good job of estimating the size of typical errors in their measurements but usually underestimate the chance of large errors,” said Bailey, noting that the larger-than-expected frequency of large differences may be an almost inevitable consequence of the complex nature of scientific research.

He added that as measurements become more and more accurate, the smallest things matter more and more.

“If two measurements agree, you're happy. If not, you see there's something you need to investigate,” he said. "You track down the cause of the variation and report the cause. Or you say that you don't know the cause, and this reduces the trust in your result.”

But with finite time and financial resources, researchers often have to make a choice between having a large sample of data such as tens of thousands of people in a survey and having a large number of variables.

“You start with a very large sample that just lumps everyone together. You then might have to ask if your result is the same for both men and women. Is it the same for different backgrounds, Canadians versus Americans, for example,” Bailey said. “At that point, you have to ask if your results hold for the smaller data set. Your sample is getting smaller and more can go wrong.”

Impossible not to be a little wrong?

Physics studies did not fare significantly better than medical research and other findings. However, the highly quantifiable way in which values and uncertainties are reported, may make physics more useful in terms of the degree of reproducibility of results that researchers should reasonably expect, he said.

“Scientists will still aim for the most accurate results, but their expectations of how well those aims are met may be tempered in light of this research,” Bailey said.

Beholding beauty: U of T scientist decodes how your brain reacts to architecture

ullahnor — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 20:31:59 +0000

Beholding beauty: U of T scientist decodes how your brain reacts to architecture

ullahnor Fri, 01/13/2017 - 15:31

Cutline

Dirk Bernhardt-Walther: “Architecture can affect people's productivity, mood and even overall quality of life” (photo by Peter Balcerzak)

Peter McMahon

Author legacy

Peter McMahon

Topic

Subheadline

Study finds that humans process architecture and faces using the same part of the brain

In the first-of-its-kind study, a University of Toronto-led team has identified the ways our minds perceive architecture and discovered that an unexpected area of the brain is involved.

Researchers used functional MRI scans to characterize the neural mechanisms for encoding the style and structure of built spaces into the perceptions stored in our brains.

After exposing study participants to different images, the researchers found that areas of the brain associated with processing scenes and faces encode architectural styles in similar ways.

“That was a real surprise for us,” said Dirk Bernhardt-Walther, an assistant professor in psychology at U of T's Faculty of Arts & Science. “We assumed it was somewhere in the visual system, but no one had been able to tease it out before.”

Bernhardt-Walther's lab uses neuroimaging, psychophysics, eye tracking and computational modeling to explore how people see and hear their real-world environments.

Matthew Allen, an assistant professor at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, is interested in the connection between the brain and architecture. He says the research gives architects something to ponder.

“It used to be the case that architects would put a lot of effort into designing the facades of buildings, which they thought would express deeper ideas about proportion or beauty or character or something else, ”Allen said. “This way of thinking about architecture fell out of fashion with modernism, which generally focused more on simple volumes than the details of ornamentation. This research should give architects a way to think through these modernist orthodoxies from a new angle.”

To conduct the study, Bernhardt-Walther and his team used fMRI technology to record the brain activity of 23 students (approximately half of which were architecture students) as they viewed blocks of images in a variety of categories:

representative buildings of four architectural styles (Byzantine, Renaissance, modern and deconstructive)
representative buildings designed by four famous architects of modern and deconstructive styles (Le Corbusier, Antoni Gaudi, Frank Gehry and Frank Lloyd-Wright)
four scene categories (mountains, pastures, highways and playgrounds)
photographs of faces of four different non-famous men

"We have previously been able to see how specific areas of our brains decode big scenes,” said Bernhardt-Walther. “But this is the first study to focus specifically on buildings.”

Using machine learning techniques, Bernhardt-Walther and his team decoded from patterns of brain activity of participants, the style and the architect of the building that they were viewing while positioned inside the fMRI scanner.

During the study, participants' brains registered activity in the parahippocampal place area (PPA) previously thought to be involved mostly with perceiving views of houses and scenes. But the team found that the PPA also encodes the visual details of different architectural styles.

In addition to the PPA, other visually active brain areas participated in the encoding of architecture. The fusiform face area (FFA), an area known to relate to face perception and visual expertise, also participated when discriminating architectural styles.

“The FFA normally doesn't care at all about images of places, including buildings,” said Bernhardt-Walther. “For instance, our experiments also contained a condition in which we decoded from brain activity whether participants looked at images of mountains versus pastures, versus highways, versus playgrounds. The FFA did not activate much for these images, and the FFA did not participate in the network of brain regions involved in this discrimination,” he says.

“However, we found that the FFA gets tightly integrated into a network of place-related brain regions for discrimination among architectural styles. This may have to do with its role in discriminating fine configural details and visual expertise.”

Another unexpected result of the study was that experts and non-experts seem to see architecture the same way – a fact that intrigues Allen.

“Architects often worry that their ideas won't get across to any non-architect who happens to look at their work,” Allen said. “This line of research ought to shed some light on what people see –and how they understand what they see – when they look at buildings.”

Bernhardt-Walther and his team believe this might mean such expertise is likely to come into play more in the interpretation and evaluation of visual perceptions of architecture.

In the future, Bernhardt-Walther and his team at U of T together with colleagues at Technion Israel Institute of Technology and at the University of Frankfurt in Germany are aiming to develop methods of measuring people's appreciation of different kinds of architecture.

“Architecture doesn't just include famous buildings that we visit while on vacation in Europe or New York City or Chicago...It determines the spaces that we live and work in every day,” said Bernhardt-Walther. “As such, architecture can affect people's productivity, mood and even overall quality of life.”

U of T sociologist maps the social networks of seniors

lavende4 — Fri, 02 Sep 2016 14:26:58 +0000

U of T sociologist maps the social networks of seniors

lavende4 Fri, 09/02/2016 - 10:26

Cutline

Seniors need strong social networks, says Markus Schafer (Photo by Diana Tyszko)

Peter McMahon

Author legacy

Peter McMahon

Topic

Breaking Research

Sociology

Faculty of Arts & Science

Seniors

social networks

If you’re 18, you likely spend a lot of time cultivating your social network, but what if you’re 80?

According to University of Toronto sociologist Markus Schafer, the social networks of senior citizens play a key role in their overall health.

Schafer decided to study networks in seniors after he spent 2005 living in a retirement residence as part of a partnership between a gerontology program at Purdue University, where he was completing his PhD, and a local continuing care community. After living among these residents for a year, he set out to interview each person in the community.

As part of his survey, Schafer asked seniors to name the people they spent time with and with whom they discussed important matters.

This created an inventory of friends and social contacts for each member of the retirement community.

He then mapped out how seniors interacted in their community and explored the connections between social networks and health.

Schafer found that people who were in poor health tended to have smaller social circles and to aspire to friendship with healthier peers – even as many of those healthy seniors did not reciprocate their desire for friendship. People in better health, on the other hand, tended to be more popular, to be identified as a friend without themselves endorsing the friendship and to have a more diverse range of social connections.

“The healthier people were, the more selective they seemed to be about their social circles,” Schafer says.

In another set of studies using nationally representative survey data, Schafer found that further evidence indicated that size isn’t the only consideration for older adults’ social networks. The internal wiring of one’s network structure— how people’s network members are themselves connected to each other—also seems to matter.

He found that in social networks that are very interconnected – in which a senior’s friends also know one another – there is less chance of the senior experiencing mistreatment.

“There was less likelihood of elder abuse. When there is a tight-knit network, seniors have less chance of being bullied, taken advantage of financially, or physically abused,” Schafer says.

The importance of Schafer’s work is being noticed: he recently received the Province of Ontario’s Early Research Award, given to academics in the first five years of their career.

Funding from the award will support his team of graduate students as they seek to understand how various aspects of older adults’ social networks shape their health and how different facets of physical and mental health shape different properties of their social networks. “The goal of the project is to better understand the reciprocal, back-and-forth relationship between networks and health in later life”, says Schafer.

To that end, Schafer and his students are conducting analyses on data from a number of well-respected North American surveys that span many years.

Interpretation of this data could shed further light on how social networks and health interact from childhood to old age.

Schafer and his team also plan to interview seniors across the Greater Toronto Area to explore how Torontonians retain a high quality of life in later years. He plans to examine whether seniors’ networks operate differently across various neighbourhood contexts and is especially interested in the experience of older adults in gentrifying areas of the urban core and in Toronto’s inner suburbs.

University of Toronto chemists create vitamin-driven battery

lanthierj — Tue, 02 Aug 2016 17:08:06 +0000

University of Toronto chemists create vitamin-driven battery

lanthierj Tue, 08/02/2016 - 13:08

Cutline

Dwight Seferos, holding the nickel-sized prototype, hopes the team's breakthrough could lay the groundwork for metal-free batteries to support the next wave of consumer electronics (photo by Diana Tyszko)

Peter McMahon

Author legacy

Peter McMahon

Topic

Breaking Research

Research & Innovation

Faculty of Arts & Science

Chemistry

Sustainability

Environment

Subheadline

Environmentally-friendly battery is long-lasting and high voltage

A team of University of Toronto chemists has created a battery that stores energy in a biologically-derived unit, paving the way for cheaper consumer electronics that are easier on the environment.

The battery is similar to many commercially-available high-energy lithium-ion batteries with one important difference. It uses flavin from vitamin B2 as the cathode: the part that stores the electricity that is released when connected to a device.

“We've been looking to nature for a while to find complex molecules for use in a number of consumer electronics applications,” says Dwight Seferos, an associate professor in U of T’s department of chemistry and Canada Research Chair in Polymer Nanotechnology.

“When you take something made by nature that is already complex, you end up spending less time making new material,” says Seferos.

Background battery basics

To understand the discovery, it’s important to know that modern batteries contain three basic parts:

a positive terminal – the metal part that touches devices to power them – connected to a cathode inside the battery casing
a negative terminal connected to an anode inside the battery casing
an electrolyte solution, in which ions can travel between the cathode and anode electrodes

When a battery is connected to a phone, iPod, camera or other device that requires power, electrons flow from the anode – the negatively charged electrode of the device supplying current – out to the device, then into the cathode and ions migrate through the electrolyte solution to balance the charge. When connected to a charger, this process happens in reverse.

The reaction in the anode creates electrons and the reaction in the cathode absorbs them when discharging. The net product is electricity. The battery will continue to produce electricity until one or both of the electrodes run out of the substance necessary for the reactions to occur.

Organic chemistry is kind of like Lego

While bio-derived battery parts have been created previously, this is the first one that uses bio-derived polymers – long-chain molecules – for one of the electrodes, essentially allowing battery energy to be stored in a vitamin-created plastic, instead of costlier, harder to process, and more environmentally-harmful metals such as cobalt.

“Getting the right material evolved over time and definitely took some test reactions,” says paper co-author and doctoral student Tyler Schon. “In a lot of ways, it looked like this could have failed. It definitely took a lot of perseverance.”

Schon, Seferos and colleagues happened upon the material while testing a variety of long-chain polymers – specifically pendant group polymers: the molecules attached to a 'backbone' chain of a long molecule.

“Organic chemistry is kind of like Lego,” he says. “You put things together in a certain order, but some things that look like they'll fit together on paper don't in reality. We tried a few approaches and the fifth one worked,” says Seferos.

Building a better power pack

The team created the material from vitamin B2 that originates in genetically-modified fungi using a semi-synthetic process to prepare the polymer by linking two flavin units to a long-chain molecule backbone.

This allows for a green battery with high capacity and high voltage – something increasingly important as the ‘Internet of Things’ continues to link us together more and more through our battery-powered portable devices.

“It's a pretty safe, natural compound," Seferos adds. “If you wanted to, you could actually eat the source material it comes from.”

B2's ability to be reduced and oxidized makes its well-suited for a lithium ion battery.

“B2 can accept up to two electrons at a time,” says Seferos. “This makes it easy to take multiple charges and have a high capacity compared to a lot of other available molecules.”

A step to greener electronics

“It's been a lot of trial-and-error,” says Schon. “Now we're looking to design new variants that can be recharged again and again.”

While the current prototype is on the scale of a hearing aid battery, the team hopes their breakthrough could lay the groundwork for powerful, thin, flexible, and even transparent metal-free batteries that could support the next wave of consumer electronics.

The team's paper outlining the discovery appeared in the July issue of Advanced Functional Materials.

What brought sea louse epidemic to BC salmon? U of T researchers explain

lanthierj — Wed, 20 Jul 2016 14:39:04 +0000

What brought sea louse epidemic to BC salmon? U of T researchers explain

lanthierj Wed, 07/20/2016 - 10:39

Cutline

Salmon swarm about a diver inspecting a pen on a fish farm in British Columbia (photo by Natalie B. Fobes/National Geographic/Getty Images)

Peter McMahon

Author legacy

Peter McMahon

Topic

Global Lens

Faculty of Arts & Science

Research & Innovation

fisheries

salmon

Environment

Subheadline

“This is a lesson about the importance of better coordinating and timing regional treatment and being aware of warming ocean temperatures"

High ocean temperatures and poor timing of parasite management likely led to an epidemic of sea lice in 2015 throughout salmon farms in British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Strait, a University of Toronto-led study has found.

The sea lice spread to migrating juvenile wild salmon, resulting in the highest numbers of sea lice observed on wild salmon in a decade.

In spring of 2015, a team of U of T ecologists led by postdoctoral researchers Andrew Bateman and Stephanie Peacock found that more than 70 per cent of fish the team sampled in the Strait's Broughton Archipelago had at least one sea louse: the highest prevalence of such parasites since 2005.

“It was sort of a perfect storm of environmental conditions and mismanagement of treatment,” says Peacock, a postdoctoral fellow in the U of T’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology when the research was conducted.

“A lot of people talk about how sea lice are natural, but in farms, you have these parasites in larger numbers. Juvenile wild salmon are then exposed as they migrate past these areas.”

Because farmed salmon are in open net pens and share water with nearby wild salmon, the parasites can transmit to young wild salmon who wouldn't normally encounter sea lice until later in life. These young fish are sometimes as small as three centimetres in length, while sea lice themselves can be close to one centimetre in diameter.

“Getting sea lice at such an early age affects young salmons' health and their ability to fend off predators,” says Peacock.

(Image below: juvenile chum salmon infested with sea louse parasites/ photo by Stephanie Peacock)

Based on the numbers of lice on juvenile salmon in 2015, researchers predicted an additional 9 - 39 per cent decline in returning pink salmon due to the outbreak.

Explaining an epidemic

In order to determine the cause of this outbreak, the team assessed the evidence for four contributing factors:

influx of lice on returning adult pink salmon
sea surface temperature
the timing of chemical treatments to control sea lice on salmon farms
resistance of sea lice to chemical treatment on farms

“Even though parasite treatments on farms were effective, we saw that treatments failed to protect wild salmon, and this happened at a time of unexpected warming in ocean water in these regions,” says Martin Krkosek, assistant professor in U of T’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology. Krkosek was Bateman’s and Peacock's supervisor and study co-author.

The fall of 2014 did have a healthy return of adult pink salmon, bringing sea lice into near-shore waters where they could infect farmed salmon. High ocean temperatures during winter months then likely accelerated sea-louse development, enabling populations to grow quickly and reach higher numbers than they would under normal ocean temperatures.

Also in 2015, individual salmon farms did not coordinate anti-louse treatments, with some farms delaying treatment until just prior to the time when juvenile salmon migrate past farms. As a result, sea lice from those farms could have spread to adjacent farms, hampering area-wide control of the outbreak.

“Furthermore, during the juvenile wild salmon migration, farms are supposed to treat for sea lice within 15 days of when a threshold number of lice are found on adult farmed salmon,” says Peacock. “But in 2015, some farms waited several months before they treated.”

“The strategy might have been 'wait until the migration to treat' but it kind of backfired because the louse populations were allowed to grow in the meantime, and the lice spread to other nearby farms. It likely created a bigger problem down the road.”

Preventing the next outbreak

“We were surprised to see that some farms don’t seem to be following their license conditions,” says Peacock. “We thought maybe there were more infractions in 2015 that may have led to higher numbers of sea lice, but when we looked back over 10 -15 years, the rate of such infractions was about the same. The big difference in 2015 really seems to be the combination of a lack of proactive parasite treatment and higher water temperatures.”

The team suggested the solution to such an outbreak in the future would likely be an earlier, coordinated parasite treatment effort between salmon farms – something the researchers say is lacking in this area and across the country.

“Sea lice used to be a problem a decade or so ago, then parasite management changed and it seemed like the problem had been effectively managed for several years. Then it wasn't managed well all of a sudden,” says Krkosek. “This is a lesson about the importance of better coordinating and timing regional treatment and being aware of warming ocean temperatures."

The results of the team's study appear in a paper published in the July edition of the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.

(Photo above by Stephanie Peacock)

Second-generation social scientist traces effects of poverty; tackles myths about racists

lavende4 — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 18:56:54 +0000

Second-generation social scientist traces effects of poverty; tackles myths about racists

lavende4 Mon, 07/18/2016 - 14:56

Cutline

Geoffrey Wodtke: growing up in poor neighbourhoods impacts success in school (Diana Tyszko photo)

Peter McMahon

Author legacy

Peter McMahon

Topic

Our Community

Faculty of Art & Science

The neighbourhoods I grew up in were middle class,” says Wisconsin-born University of Toronto sociologist Geoffrey Wodtke. “But growing up in and around Milwaukee — one of the most segregated cities in the U.S. and containing some of the poorest areas in the country — we were never that far from some very disadvantaged places.”

As a prof in the 60s and 70s in the U.S., Wodtke’s educational psychologist father became interested in racial inequity and schooling, “back when it was a taboo topic,” Wodtke says. “I grew up talking with him about that, reading a lot of the stuff he’d put in front of me and got into that as an area of research as a result.”

Wodtke — whose mother worked with students from a variety of poor neighbourhoods as a special education teacher in Wisconsin — has started to make a name for himself with the discovery that the amount of time children spend growing up in poor neighbourhoods directly impacts their success in school. “In general, the longer a child spends in a poor neighbourhood, the worse off they are,” Wodtke says.

An individual who lives in a poor neighbourhood for part of their childhood and in a wealthy neighbourhood for another part of their childhood is more likely to finish high school, for example, than comparable youth who spend their entire childhood in poor neighbourhoods.

Wodtke’s findings are derived from data from the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which has followed children from birth through early adulthood almost every year since 1968.

He compared outcomes — whether someone graduated from high school, whether someone became a parent as a teen — among children who lived in different neighbourhoods for different amounts of time but who were otherwise comparable on measured family and household characteristics.

The findings about the importance of duration of exposure to certain neighbourhoods have led to a re-analysis of some big housing mobility experiments in the U.S., Wodtke says.

For example, Wodtke notes that moving a child from an environment of poverty to one of opportunity specifically during early childhood appears to increase the chances for those youth of attending college and earning a higher income as a young adult. There has been some success in the U.S. on this score when randomly-selected residents of poor, high-density housing projects are provided with housing vouchers enabling them to move to a higher income neighbourhood.

Wodtke hopes to next investigate why growing up in a poor neighbourhood has negative effects on children.

“There’s some sense that children living in poor neighbourhoods don’t go as a far in school because the schools to which they have access just aren’t very good.”

But there may other explanations, Wodtke says. For example, children living in poor neighbourhoods are disproportionately exposed to violent crime and environmental health hazards that interfere with brain development and cognitive function.

“Unfortunately, there are few empirical studies on this, so I’m currently in the process of gathering data.”

Another area of interest for Wodtke is attitudes toward race. Several years ago, there was extensive media coverage of a study that said smart white people are less racist than less-intelligent white people. The findings didn’t ring true to Wodtke.

“I was a little skeptical of that claim and I thought ‘That’s a much too simple answer,’” he says.

Working with data from the General Social Survey and Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, he found that white people who ranked as intelligent think of themselves as quite liberal and are more likely to reject negative racial stereotypes and support racial equality in principle. They support residential integration and inter-racial marriage and are less likely to refer to black people as lazy or unintelligent.

However, this same group of intelligent white people were no more likely, and in some cases they were even less likely, to support policies designed to encourage racial equality — such as workplace affirmative action, open housing laws, or busing between school districts — than their less-intelligent counterparts. Moreover, among white Americans who were born well before the Civil Rights Movement, the association between higher intelligence and rejection of negative racial stereotypes completely disappears.

“When you take a broader look at the association of racial attitudes and intelligence in the U.S., you see a much more complicated picture than what was being put out in the media,” Wodtke says.

Looking for a non-profit CEO? Choose a teddy bear, not a shark: University of Toronto study

krisha — Wed, 22 Jun 2016 14:39:43 +0000

Looking for a non-profit CEO? Choose a teddy bear, not a shark: University of Toronto study krisha Wed, 06/22/2016 - 10:39

Peter McMahon

Author legacy

Peter McMahon

Topic

Breaking Research

Psychology

Research & Innovation. Faculty of Arts & Science

Nicholas Rule

Subheadline

Not-for-profits raise more money when leader looks less powerful, research finds

Having the face of a leader may depend on whether the enterprise being led is a for-profit business or a non-profit organization, new research from the University of Toronto has found.

It's the latest finding by the social perception and cognition experts who've advised us on:

how to tell a trustworthy face from an untrustworthy face

how much weight we'd need to lose to seem more attractive to others

what our selfie habits reveal about us

In a paper entitled “Predicting Firm Success from the Facial Appearance of Chief Executive Officers of Non-Profit Organizations,” published in the journal Perception, Daniel Re, a postdoctoral fellow and Nicholas Rule, an associate professor of psychology, report on three separate studies that suggest the facial features of successful non-profit CEOs are noticeably different from leaders of for-profit companies.

Power and charity don't mix

For the first study, Re, Rule and team showed images of the faces of many of the CEOs of the 100 highest-revenue non-profit organizations – or NPOs – as listed by Forbes for 2009, 2010 and 2011.

A group of 169 participants were shown closely-cropped black and white photos of CEO faces – but not told they were CEOs – and asked to rate them on dominance, likability, facial maturity, and trustworthiness, as well as leadership, age, attractiveness, and happiness.

The researchers then grouped some of the scores together, combining dominance and facial maturity into a score they called 'power', for example, as well as grouping trustworthiness and likability into a score they labelled 'warmth'.

They found that the non-profit CEO faces that the participants saw as having high 'power' scores tended to have lower total revenue, funding from private sources, and fundraising efficiency for their organizations than non-profits with CEOs that ranked lower on the power index.

"The results were actually much more dramatic than I would have thought," says Re. "Previous studies have shown that CEOs who appear dominant seem to do well when it comes to generating wealth. But for NPOs, we found the opposite."

Sharks vs teddy bears

Re and Rule also had a group of participants look at the faces of CEOs of profit-based businesses. The participants’ scores suggested that the CEOs of successful for-profit companies look more powerful than the CEOs of NPOs.

This seems to support the results of previous studies that have suggested facial cues of power signal real dominance, aggression, and selfishness, and that people who display these facial cues may enjoy greater success as leaders of companies where the main goal is personal gain and stakeholder wealth.

A new view of non-profit leadership

"Even though the most successful CEOs of for-profit businesses might be these cut-throat, intense sharks, that's not necessarily the key to good leadership across-the-board," says Re.

"What we seem to have found is that people who come off as more powerful won't get as far or do as well working at non-profits," says Re. "It's not necessarily that non-profits are picking softer-looking people, it's that such people – perhaps drawn to working for a nobler cause – are likely the ones who have gotten ahead and risen through the ranks throughout their career in the non-profit industry."

New lizard found in Dominican Republic, U of T researchers say

lanthierj — Fri, 17 Jun 2016 16:19:26 +0000

New lizard found in Dominican Republic, U of T researchers say

lanthierj Fri, 06/17/2016 - 12:19

Cutline

(photos of lizard by Miguel Landestoy)

Peter McMahon

Author legacy

Peter McMahon

Topic

Global Lens

Faculty of Arts & Science

Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

Subheadline

Species is already at risk

A University of Toronto-led team has reported the discovery of a new lizard in the middle of the most- visited island in the Caribbean, strengthening a long-held theory that communities of lizards can evolve almost identically on separate islands.

The chameleon-like lizard – a Greater Antillean anole dubbed Anolis landestoyi for the naturalist who first spotted and photographed it – is one of the first new anole species found in the Dominican Republic in decades.

“As soon as I saw the pictures, I thought, 'I need to buy a plane ticket,'” says Luke Mahler of U of T’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology and lead author of an article on the discovery published today online in The American Naturalist.

“Our immediate thought was that this looks like something that's supposed to be in Cuba, not in Hispaniola – the island that Haiti and the Dominican Republic share,” says Mahler. “We haven't really seen any completely new species here since the early 1980s.”

What's more, the new species could help piece together a long-standing puzzle of similar looking species that exist on different Caribbean islands.

“I got a grainy photo from local naturalist Miguel Landestoy, who saw a nesting pair of birds that were mobbing a branch,” says Mahler. “He saw they were flying around what he thought was a new species of heavily camouflaged anole clinging to that branch.”

It wasn’t possible to say much from the photo though, and Mahler didn’t think much of it.

“You get all these people who say they found a new species but it's almost always just an atypical individual of a very common species,” says Mahler. “So you get pretty hardened against thinking claims like these are legit.”

A few years after the initial photo, Landestoy caught one of the lizards and emailed clear images of the find to Mahler and several other researchers he'd been working with. “As soon as I opened the email, I thought 'what on earth is that!?,'” says Mahler, pictured below with Miguel Landestoy (at right) and the first specimens of Anolis landestoyi. (Photo courtesy of Luke Mahler.)

Well-studied ecologically, Greater Antillean anoles are a textbook example of a phenomenon known as replicated adaptive radiation, where related species evolving on different islands diversify into similar sets of species that occupy the same ecological niches.

Examples of this could be long-tailed grass dwellers, bright green canopy lizards, and stocky brown species that perch low on tree trunks, each living in similar environments on more than one island.

Although most Greater Antillean anoles may have a matching counterpart on another island, scientists have long known that a sizeable fraction do not – roughly one fifth of the region’s anole species are ‘exceptions to the rule’ so far.

Most noticeable among these unique lizards are Cuban anoles from the Chamaeleolis group.

Chamaeleolis anoles look less like typical anoles and more like chameleons: large, cryptic, slow-moving, and prone to clinging to lichen-covered branches high in forest canopies.

Scientists believed there was nothing like these Cuban lizards on the other Greater Antillean islands.

Anolis landestoyi was found in the Dominican Republic but bears a strong resemblance to Cuba's Chamaeleolis anoles.

The new discovery suggests that there may be fewer exceptions to this island evolution rule than the science community previously appreciated.

“Like the discovery of a missing puzzle piece, Anolis landestoyi clarifies our view of replicated adaptive radiation in anoles,” says Mahler, noting that the discovery adds new support for the idea that the buildup of ecological communities on islands can be surprisingly predictable.

Though new to science, Anolis landestoyi is already at risk. The new species is restricted to a unique habitat only found in a small area in the western Dominican Republic that is rapidly disappearing due to illegal deforestation. Mahler, who also works with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), hopes that the new discovery will help to bring attention to conservation issues in the region.

Next for Mahler and team is to figure out if Anolis landestoyi evolved on Hispaniola to be strikingly similar to Cuba's Chamaeleolis anoles or if the similarity is due to shared ancestry. The new species and Chamaeleolis are close relatives, but are not next of kin.

“We don't know if it's convergence or the fact that it’s pretty closely related to Chamaeleolis, which may have colonized Hispaniola from Cuba,” says Mahler. “But either way, things are more similar across these two islands than we thought.”

“I always wanted to describe a new species,” says Mahler. “Doing so is the fulfillment of a dream I've had since I was a little kid.”

University of Toronto-led research suggests some major changes to geology textbooks

krisha — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 17:31:31 +0000

University of Toronto-led research suggests some major changes to geology textbooks krisha Fri, 06/10/2016 - 13:31

Cutline

Moraine Lake at Banff National Park. Photo by Russell Pyslkywec

Peter McMahon

Author legacy

Peter McMahon

Topic

Breaking Research

Faculty of Arts & Science; Research; Faculty & Staff

Subheadline

“A potentially major revision to the fundamental idea of plate tectonics”

Super-computer modelling of the Earth’s crust and upper-mantle suggests that ancient geologic events may have left deep ‘scars’ that can come to life to play a role in earthquakes, mountain formation, and other ongoing processes on our planet.

This changes the widespread view that only interactions at the boundaries between continent-sized tectonic plates could be responsible for such events.

A team of researchers from the University of Toronto and the University of Aberdeen have created models indicating that former plate boundaries may stay hidden deep beneath the Earth’s surface. These multi-million-year-old structures, situated at sites away from existing plate boundaries, may trigger changes in the structure and properties at the surface in the interior regions of continents.

“This is a potentially major revision to the fundamental idea of plate tectonics,” says lead author Philip Heron, a postdoctoral fellow in Russell Pysklywec’s research group in U of T’s department of Earth sciences. Their paper, “Lasting mantle scars lead to perennial plate tectonics,” appears in the June 10, 2016 edition of Nature Communications.

A new map of Earth’s ancient geology

Heron and Pysklywec, together with University of Aberdeen geologist Randell Stephenson have even proposed a ‘perennial plate tectonic map’ of the Earth to help illustrate how ancient processes may have present-day implications.

“It’s based on the familiar global tectonic map that is taught starting in elementary school,” says Pysklywec, who is also chair of U of T’s department of Earth sciences. “What our models redefine and show on the map are dormant, hidden, ancient plate boundaries that could also be enduring or “perennial” sites of past and active plate tectonic activity.”

To demonstrate the dominating effects that anomalies below the Earth’s crust can have on shallow geological features, the researchers used U of T’s SciNet – home to Canada’s most powerful computer and one of the most powerful in the world – to make numerical models of the crust and upper-mantle into which they could introduce these scar-like anomalies.

Fig. 1, below. A proposed perennial plate tectonic map. Present-day plate boundaries (white lines), with hidden ancient plate boundaries that may reactivate to control plate tectonics (yellow lines). Image credit: Russell Pysklywec, Philip Heron, Randell Stephenson.

Simulating yesterday’s continents

The team essentially created an evolving “virtual Earth” to explore how such geodynamic models develop under different conditions.

“For these sorts of simulations, you need to go to a pretty high-resolution to understand what’s going on beneath the surface,” says Heron. “We modeled 1,500 kilometres across and 600 kilometres deep, but some parts of these structures could be just two or three kilometres wide. It is important to accurately resolve the smaller-scale stresses and strains.”

Using these models, the team found that different parts of the mantle below the Earth’s crust may control the folding, breaking, or flowing of the Earth’s crust within plates — in the form of mountain-building and seismic activity – when under compression.

In this way, the mantle structures dominate over shallower structures in the crust that had previously been seen as the main cause of such deformation within plates.

“The mantle is like the thermal engine of the planet and the crust is an eggshell above,” says Pysklywec. “We’re looking at the enigmatic and largely unexplored realm in the Earth where these two regions meet.”

An Earth in hibernation

“Most of the really big plate tectonic activity happens on the plate boundaries, like when India rammed into Asia to create the Himalayas or how the Atlantic opened to split North America from Europe,” says Heron. “But there are lots of things we couldn’t explain, like seismic activity and mountain-building away from plate boundaries in continent interiors.”

The research team believes their simulations show that these mantle anomalies are generated through ancient plate tectonic processes, such as the closing of ancient oceans, and can remain hidden at sites away from normal plate boundaries until reactivation generates tectonic folding, breaking, or flowing in plate interiors.

“Future exploration of what lies in the mantle beneath the crust may lead to further such discoveries on how our planet works, generating a greater understanding of how the past may affect our geologic future,” says Heron.

The research carries on the legacy of J. Tuzo Wilson, also a U of T scientist, and a legendary figure in geosciences who pioneered the idea of plate tectonics in the 1960’s.

“Plate tectonics is really the cornerstone of all geoscience,” says Pysklywec. “Ultimately, this information could even lead to ways to help better predict how and when earthquakes happen. It’s a key building block.”