, associate professor in the , is battling invasive species with his innovative Herbicide Ballistic Technology (HBT™). Leary has invented a way to adapt readily available pneumatic paintball guns to shoot small gelatin capsules filled with herbicide to control invasive plants and trees. In Maui, Leary’s main focus is miconia, an invasive weed that shades out native plants and damages the ecosystem.

The paintballs, custom made by , can be used to treat hard-to-reach areas like cliffs and ravines. The technology also reduces disturbance of remote areas and is safer for the person applying the herbicide because the chemical is safely contained in the small projectiles.

Further, this approach allows for targeted and cost-effective treatment of invasive plant species. While riding in a helicopter, Leary can treat an individual invasive plant from a range of up to 100 feet.

“We’re able to, with our efforts, protect an acre of forested watershed at less than $10,” Leary said in a “So it’s a very economical approach because of the efficiency the helicopter provides.”

In a , Leary, in collaboration with the Maui Invasive Species Committee, described how more than 4,000 of the invasive weed trees were targeted and eliminated in remote areas of Maui watershed in just over a year using the revolutionary HBT.

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—By Marcie Grabowski

The is ranked the 15th university in the world for earth and environmental science according to this year’s . Anchored by the , 东精影业 Mānoa ranked higher than nearly 8,000 other institutions.

The Nature Index ranks institutions based on the number of research papers published in and a select group of other prestigious journals, each of which include peer-review by active researchers.

“Publication in these journals is a significant achievement in and of itself. To be in the top tier of universities with such highly impactful publications is testament to the quality and importance of the earth and environmental science research undertaken by our faculty, postdoc and students,” said Brian Taylor, 东精影业 Mānoa interim vice chancellor for research.

“The Nature Index provides absolute counts of high-quality publication productivity at the institutional and national level, and as such is one indicator of high-quality research output across the globe,” according to the Nature Publishing Group.

Of the top 22 earth and environmental science institutions, seven are national agencies or laboratories (such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences and NASA) and 15 are universities.

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—By Marcie Grabowski

The has been ranked among the top world universities for its scientific publications.

On October 10, the (NTU Ranking) team released the results of its 2014 Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities. The ranking lists the University of Hawaiʻi as 203rd overall, and 80th in the United States, out of the top 500 world universities.

Five University of Hawaiʻi subject areas and/or fields were identified as leaders among the top-ranked universities:

• Geosciences—Ranked 17
• Environment/Ecology—Ranked 88
• Physics—Ranked 104
• Natural Sciences—Ranked 105
• Plant and Animal Science—Ranked 109

“This is a welcome recognition of the importance of the scientific research done by our faculty and students,” said Brian Taylor, 东精影业 Mānoa vice chancellor for research. “We are particularly pleased to be ranked in the top 20 world universities for our work in the geosciences (earth, ocean, atmospheric and planetary sciences).”

“Today, the output of published scientific papers has become a more objective metric used to determine a university’s research performance,” added 东精影业 Vice President for Research and Innovation Vassilis Syrmos. “I am very pleased with the University of Hawaiʻi’s recent NTU ranking and its snapshot of our continuing efforts in research productivity, research impact and research excellence.”

About the National Taiwan University Ranking

The Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities is a stable and reliable ranking for universities devoted to scientific research. It is entirely based on statistics of scientific papers which reflect three major performance criteria鈥攔esearch productivity, research impact and research excellence.

This year, in addition to the overall performance ranking, NTU offers 6 field-based rankings and 14 subject-based rankings. NTU is committed to continually update and release new annual overall, field, and subject rankings in the future.

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—By Talia Ogliore

Advanced communications technology could bring broadband wireless service to remote and rural areas in the Hawaiian Islands, under a new research grant funded by the (NSF).

The at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s received $500,000 to pursue an innovative solution based on improving the efficiency of radio spectrum utilization.

And it’s not just wireless for folks living off the grid in Hāna. Across the United States, more than 19 million people, or 6 percent of the population, do not have access to reliable broadband communications coverage. Availability of such coverage is essential to education, jobs, healthcare and economic development, yet many people living in rural or otherwise inaccessible areas have only low-speed dial-up access or no data service at all.

Rough terrain and large undeveloped areas often present challenges to the implementation of cost-effective and reliable broadband wireless service.

The Hawaiʻi Center for Advanced Communications is proposing a new solution based on the use of smart networking with high-performance directional antennas, propagation modeling applications and spectrum-sensing resources.

“New network access protocols need to be developed, so that these advances may be achieved without affecting available communications standards and systems,” said Magdy F. Iskander, director of the Hawaiʻi Center for Advanced Communications. “Our solution represents a bold new concept for integrating these new capabilities to support customers in low-density regions.”

The program director for the NSF electrical, communications and cyber systems division who recommended the grant described the Hawaiʻi Center for Advanced Communications proposal as “an excellent proposal which will make a major impact on wireless communications for rural areas…[It] will have a transformative impact on rural communities.”

The new NSF funding will support three years of research and development activity, during which time Iskander and the Hawaiʻi Center for Advanced Communications team will develop a prototype of their new broadband technology and test it in rural areas in Hawaiʻi.

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—By Talia Ogliore

The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa mechanical engineer Yi Zuo has developed a new, high-throughput method for sorting cells capable of separating 10 billion bacterial cells in 30 minutes.

The finding has already proven useful for studying bacterial cells and microalgae, and could one day have direct applications for biomedical research and environmental science—basically any field in which a large quantity of microbial samples need to be processed.

The new method was described in a September 2014 publication in the scientific journal .

Almost all of today’s previously existing cell-sorting methods rely on what is called a single-cell analysis platform. These methods sort cells by running each individual cell through a kind of gateway that nabs out the ones that embody a single, defined physical property. Such methods can be designed to sort cells by size or identify cells that display a targeted feature, such as a fluorescent dye that has been added.

Zuo’s method is different. It is a bulk method that sorts different cell populations by turning their solubility.

“It has no apparent limitations in sorting throughput,” said Zuo, who came up with the original idea while teaching a 东精影业 Mānoa graduate level mechanical engineering class, ME650 Surface Phenomena.“We can separate 10 billion bacterial cells within 30 minutes.”

The new method relies on a measurement principle that sorts cells by differentiating their characteristic surface free energies.

For liquid surfaces, surface free energy is equal to surface tension. But for solid surfaces, such as the surface of cells, surface free energy cannot be measured directly. Instead, surface free energy for solids was previously estimated using a contact angle measurement with complicated theoretical interpretations.

Although plausible, this principle was very hard to implement,” said Zuo. “Compared to other cell properties, such as size and deformability, it is technically challenging to determine their surface free energy. Only recently we developed a novel spectrophotometric method for directly determining the surface free energy of live cells. Based on this technological advance, we are able to implement the principle of surface free energy-activated cell sorting.”

Zuo did this research in collaboration with 东精影业 Mānoa civil engineer Tao Yan. Their research was supported in part by Zuo’s CAREER Award in 2013. Under this grant, Zuo is studying the molecular mechanisms of lung surfactant, which is crucial to maintaining normal respiratory function in air sacs of the lung. Zuo hopes to help expand the use of clinical surfactants to treat various neonatal and adult respiratory diseases, including respiratory distress syndrome.

The University of Hawaiʻi (OTTED) has filed a provisional U.S. patent application for new cell-sorting method, “Surface Free Energy Based Particle Sorting”

For more information, visit the 东精影业 Mānoa College of Engineering

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—By Talia Ogliore

Imagine the open ocean as a microbial megacity, teeming with life too small to be seen. In every drop of water, hundreds of types of bacteria can be found. Now scientists have discovered that communities of these ocean microbes have their own daily cycles—not unlike the residents of a bustling city who tend to wake up, commute, work and eat at the same times.

What’s more, it’s not all about the sun. Light-loving photoautotrophs—bacteria that need solar energy to help them photosynthesize food from inorganic substances—have been known to sun themselves on a regular schedule. But in a new study——published in the July 11 issue of the journal , researchers working at Station ALOHA, a deep ocean study site 100 km north of Oʻahu, observed different species of free-living, heterotrophic bacteria turning on diel cycling genes at slightly different times—suggesting a wave of transcriptional activity that passes through the microbial community each day.

“I like to say they are singing in harmony,” said Edward F. DeLong, professor of oceanography at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology team that made this discovery.

“For any given species, the gene transcripts for specific metabolic pathways turn on at the same time each day, which suggests a sort of temporal compartmentalization,” said DeLong, who was the first scientist to be hired by the University under the auspices of the . “It’s a biologically and biogeochemically relevant new result.”

The observations were made possible by advanced microbial community RNA sequencing techniques, which allow for whole-genome profiling of multiple species at once. The work was a collaboration between the and DeLong’s team, who together employed a free-drifting robotic Environmental Sample Processor (ESP) as part of a (C-MORE) research cruise at Station ALOHA. Riding the same ocean currents as the microbes it follows, the ESP is uniquely equipped to harvest the samples needed for this high-frequency, time-resolved analysis of microbial community dynamics.

What scientists saw was intriguing: different species of bacteria expressing different types of genes in different, but consistent, cycles—turning on, for example, the type of restorative genes needed to rebuild their solar-collecting powers at night, then ramping up with different gene activity to build new proteins during the day. “The regularity and timing of individual microbial activities is somewhat like a new shift of hourly workers punching in and out of the clock, day after day,” DeLong said.

The coordinated timing of gene firing across different species of ocean microbes could have important implications for energy transformation in the sea. Marine microbes are critically linked to ocean health and productivity. The mechanisms that regulate this periodicity remain to be determined.

But can you set your watch to it? DeLong says you can, but it matters whether you’re tracking the bacteria in the lab or out at sea. For example, maximal light levels at 23 meters depth at Station ALOHA were twice as high as light conditions that were previously used in experimental settings in the laboratory—which may have an effect on microbe activity and daily cycles. That’s part of why it’s so important to conduct this research in the actual open ocean environment.

This study was funded in part by the National Science Foundation and by a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Separately, in 2013, the Moore Foundation’s national awarded DeLong and 东精影业 Mānoa Professor David Karl $4.2 million to explore how the trillions of microscopic organisms at the base of the ocean’s food webs interact with each other and the environment. 

• 东精影业 News story:

DeLong aims to continue his groundbreaking in situ ocean research with support from the Moore Foundation and as co-director of the new a five-year $40 million collaboration funded by the largest private gift in 东精影业 history.

“There are some fundamental laws to be learned about how organisms interact, to make the system work better as a whole and be more efficient,” DeLong said. “At its base, that's one of the main things we’re after in SCOPE—these fundamental principles that make ecosystems work. These findings have tremendous applications in all sorts of arenas.”

• 东精影业 News video:

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—By Talia Ogliore

The passageway that links the Pacific Ocean to the Indian Ocean is acting differently because of climate change, and now its new behavior could, in turn, affect climate in both ocean basins in new ways.

physical oceanographer James Potemra is co-author of a study led by of at UC San Diego. The study, appeared in the June 22 advance online publication of .

The scientists have found that the flow of water in the Indonesian Throughflow—the network of straits that pass Indonesia’s islands—has changed since the late 2000s under the influence of dominant La Niña conditions. The flow has become more shallow and intense in the manner that water flows through a hose that has become kinked. The study suggests that human-caused climate change might make this characteristic a more dominant feature of the throughflow, even when El Niño conditions return.

Sprintall and colleagues have spent more than a decade understanding the dynamics of the throughflow, an ocean region that acts like a cable sending information between two electronic devices. The Indonesian seas are the only tropical location in the world where two oceans interact in this manner. The throughflow has an effect on the climate well beyond its boundaries, playing a role in everything from Indian monsoons to the El Niño phenomena experienced by California.

“This is a seminal paper on a key oceanographic feature that may have great utility in climate research in this century,” said Eric Lindstrom, a physical oceanography program scientist who co-chairs the Steering Committee at NASA, which funded Sprintall’s portion of the study. “The connection of the Pacific and Indian oceans through the Indonesian Seas is modulated by a complex circulation, climate variations and sensitive ocean-atmosphere feedbacks. It’s a great place for us to sustain ocean observations to monitor potential changes in the ocean’s general circulation under a changing climate.”

Sprintall, a physical oceanographer at Scripps Oceanography, said this new research starts a new chapter in the history of the throughflow, one characterized by the changed variables created by global warming.

“Now that we have a better understanding of how the Indonesian Throughflow responds to El Niño and La Niña variability, we can begin to understand how this current behaves in response to changes in the trade wind system that are brought on through anthropogenic climate change,” Sprintall said. “Changes in the amount of warm water that is carried by the throughflow will have a subsequent impact on the sea surface temperature and so shift the patterns of rainfall in the whole Asian region.”

—By Talia Ogliore

The University ofHawaiʻi is a key team member in a new five-year, $25 million research and development program focused on improving the nation’s nuclear arms control technology.

Milton Garces, associate researcher in the , will lead the infrasound portion of the new program funded by the (NNSA). The consortium effort will be led by researchers at the .

The specializes in the study of deep, inaudible atmospheric sound produced by intense explosions and extreme natural events such as volcanoes, asteroid impacts and tsunamis. These deep sounds travel through the atmosphere for thousands of miles, and can be used to pinpoint possible explosive nuclear tests from a distance.

“Infrasound can help us to quickly differentiate between underground and atmospheric explosions, as well as recognize a meteor from a missile,” said Garces, whose laboratory currently operates infrasound listening stations in Hawaiʻi and Palau as part of the International Monitoring System of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.

“东精影业 has been working on these problems for over 15 years, and is actively developing the next generation of tools to improve our global coverage and detection capabilities,” Garces said. “However, infrasound is only a small part of the puzzle, and we are honored to be part of a diverse team that is working together to properly address this topic.”

The new NNSA funding establishes the Center for Verification Technology, under which 东精影业 joins a consortium of 13 universities working with eight national labs to analyze nuclear nonproliferation efforts, improve technologies for detecting secret nuclear weapon tests, and train the next generation of nonproliferation experts. More than 20 consortium teams across the United States competed for this new program.

“Developing the R&D expertise of tomorrow can take years to cultivate,” said NNSA Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation Anne Harrington in an . “But we are linking national laboratories and academia by funding the next generation of researchers to perform complex research and gain an understanding of technical challenges in areas of major importance for the nuclear nonproliferation mission that can only be garnered first-hand at the national laboratories.”

In addition to the University of Michigan and University of Hawaiʻi, the consortium includes the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton, Columbia, North Carolina State, Pennsylvania State, Duke, University of Wisconsin, University of Florida, Oregon State, Yale, and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory; and several national laboratories, including Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest and Idaho.

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—By Talia Ogliore

A new analysis of corn production in the American Midwest has determined that today’s crop yields are more sensitive than ever to bad weather, and especially to drought conditions anticipated under likely climate change scenarios.

published in May in the journal . The study was led by a Stanford University earth scientist and co-authored by Associate Professor of Economics Michael J. Roberts at the .

“The Corn Belt is phenomenally productive,” said “>David Lobell, an associate professor of environmental Earth system science at . “But in the past two decades we saw very small yield gains in non-irrigated corn under the hottest conditions. This suggests farmers may be pushing the limits of what’s possible under these conditions.”

“A lot of agricultural research has been designed, at least in part, to improve performance during drought,” said 东精影业 Mānoa’s Roberts. “However, even as individual plants may become more drought tolerant, that doesn’t tell you what happens at a larger scale. Farmers adjust seeding rates and planting times to take advantage of new traits, which can also factor into drought sensitivity.”

To conduct their analysis, researchers combined field-level records of soybean and maize (corn) sowing and crop yields collected by the with high-resolution daily weather data. They considered four weather variables: minimum and maximum daily temperatures, precipitation, and the daytime vapor pressure deficit or VPD. The study included more than one million records for crops grown across Iowa, Illinois and Indiana between 1995 and 2012.

The researchers found that over time, crops have become more vulnerable to changes in VPD, which measures aridity, a key indicator of drought that is closely linked to extreme heat in the Midwest.

The effects were much stronger for corn than for soybeans, a result that the authors believe may be tied to how densely corn is sown. Recent technological advancements have developed corn plants with stronger, more efficient root systems—allowing for tighter sowing—but densely planted corn can suffer higher stress during periods of drought and thus produce lower yields.

The researchers predict that at current levels of temperature sensitivity, crops could lose 15 percent of their yield within 50 years, or as much as 30 percent if crops continue the trend of becoming more sensitive over time.

“In fact, if this trend in drought sensitivity continues, the impacts of climate change could be twice as bad as most people predict for this region,” Roberts said. “The key thing to recognize is that greater drought tolerance may come at a cost of lower yield potential, possibly giving up some historic productivity gains.”

Corn is the primary seed crop grown in Hawaiʻi, according to the . The United States produces about 40 percent of global corn, and 35 percent of global soy. More than 80 percent of U.S. corn is grown without special irrigation (rain-fed only).

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—By Talia Ogliore

On April 11, scientists returned from a to (PMNM) in the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. PMNM is the largest protected area in the United States, encompassing an area greater than all its national parks combined, yet over half its seafloor has never been mapped in detail due to the limited availability of the advanced sonar systems required. The team mapped more than 15,445 square miles—an area four times the size of the Big Island—of previously unmapped or poorly mapped areas inside the Monument. This represents approximately 11 percent of the total area of PMNM, and includes 18 seamounts and extensive banks off Pearl and Hermes, Midway and Kure atolls.

“The goal of the expedition was to fill large gaps in seafloor data in order to facilitate future research and discoveries in the region,” said Christopher Kelley, program biologist with University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s and chief scientist of the expedition.

Carried out aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s , the expedition utilized the ship’s state-of-the-art seafloor mapping sonar systems, among the most advanced mapping technology in the world. Approximately 98 percent of the monument’s area is deeper than 328 feet, where features including seamounts, ridges and submerged banks are home to rare and likely undiscovered species of corals, fish and other animals. Mapping is key to finding these.

“We literally have better maps of the moon than of the ocean floor,” says Randy Kosaki, deputy superintendent for research at PMNM. “These bathymetric data will go a long way toward improving our understanding of Papahānaumokuākea’s features. As natural resource managers, we can’t manage what we don’t understand.”

Another objective of this mapping effort is to identify likely sites of deep-sea coral and sponge beds. In 2003, scientists discovered the existence of these beds within PMNM in more than 3,280 feet of water.

“On this trip, we discovered more sites in the monument with the right type of topography to support these amazing deep sea coral gardens,” Kelley said. “We’ll have to wait until someone gets an opportunity to dive on the sites with a submersible or remotely operated vehicle to confirm they exist.”

Previous exploration of the few known beds led to the discovery of more than 50 new species of sponges and corals, according to Kelley. It is expected that more discoveries will be made as a result of the information gleaned from this trip.

The region’s geology was another key focus of the expedition. Ancient coral reefs that drowned as the earliest Hawaiian Islands subsided now hold a detailed record of that process spanning millions of years. Mapping can offer a big picture view of how various features are organized, which will help researchers better understand Hawaiʻi’s geological history.

“We established SOI in 2009 —and led the transformation of Falkor into a state-of-the-art research vessel— to support the world’s leading ocean scientists on their essential, but difficult-to-implement research,” says , who co-founded Schmidt Ocean Institute with her husband, Eric. “The mapping and geological work conducted during this cruise and the one that follows will inform the work of Chris Kelley and his team, and through our open sharing approach, all scientists who have a stake in better understanding this region.”

The team consisted of researchers from the , , , Schmidt Ocean Institute, the and the . This was the first of two expeditions slated for the spring of 2014; the second will take place from May 2 to June 6.

—By Talia Ogliore