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Earthquake-resistant bridge columns.
The powerful force of an earthquake can collapse
bridges instantly, stranding, and even killing people.
That is why, with funding from the National Science Foundation, engineers at Texas A&M
University are leading an NSF-funded collaborative research effort with the University of Colorado-Boulder
to investigate alternative bridge structures.
Traditional bridge columns are cast as one piece, which means that as the earth shakes,
these structures crack like a stick at both ends.
The team has proposed one possible alternative: hybrid sliding-rocking or HSR columns, which
are built as a series of individual concrete segments stacked on top of each other and
held together by steel cables that allow the columns to shift and rock without sustaining
structural damage.
By preventing bridge damage, we can maintain access to the affected areas immediately after
an earthquake, saving lives and accelerating recovery of affected communities.
PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE!
Believe it or not, cancer cells are actually lazy!
New research reveals that while cancer cells can spread quickly through the body, they’re
slow and will opt for the easiest, widest spaces to navigate to reduce energy requirements
during movement.
A team of biomedical engineers at Vanderbilt University, with funding from the National
Science Foundation, found that energy expenditure and metabolism are significant factors within
metastatic migration.
This research could lead to new ways to target metabolism and even possibly prevent metastasis.
By manipulating different variables, the team was able to track and build predictions of
cellular preference for these paths of least resistance in the body based on how much energy
a cell would need to move.
The team believes this initial understanding of energy and cell migration could soon have
broader implications for a variety of situations beyond cancer.
BIOLOGY OF BATS!
It turns out that warm-blooded animals aren’t warm all of the time!
Researchers at Brown University studying the muscles in bats’ wings found that their
wings operate at a significantly lower temperature than their bodies, especially during flight.
The National Science Foundation-funded team says this shows that warm-blooded animals
have a lot more variation in body temperature than expected.
That has implications for how animals are moving around, including humans.
If we can understand more about how muscles in bats and other specialized animals work
at extreme temperatures, maybe we can find new ways to support people that have to work
at extreme temperatures too.
To conduct their research, the team used a specialized bat wind tunnel and high-resolution
cameras to capture bats’ wings during flight to better visualize the flow around the wings
and movement from every angle.
We find that the muscles of the bats don’t have the same temperature everywhere in the
wing, If we measure the temperature of the muscles that are the main power muscles for
flight, the ones that move the wing at the shoulder, those are really close to body temperature.
As soon as we cross a joint, the temperature will be close to 5 degrees Celsius colder.
And that temperature will drop another 5 degrees Celsius as we cross the next joint and another
5 degress as we move closer to the hand.
That’s a huge drop for muscle temperature.
Most muscles move more slowly when it’s cold,
So a bat wing can continue to perform in a really sophisticated way even when its gets
colder and colder.”
Understanding muscular and behavioral adaptation could help scientists to improve the regulation
of human exercise in the cold, or even in heat.
This could prove particularly important for workers like fisherman who operate in cold
water or even scientists and other personnel working at NSF’s scientific research stations,
in Antarctica!
For more information about these stories, visit us at nsf.gov.
This is NSF Science Now, I’m Dena Headlee.
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