In a study published June 3 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the team showed that nearly half of fresh submarine groundwater discharge flows into the ocean near the tropics. They also found that regions near active fault lines—the area around the San Andreas Fault in California, for example—send greater volumes of groundwater into the ocean than regions that are tectonically stable. And, they found that dry, arid regions have very little groundwater discharge, opening the limited groundwater supplies in those parts of the world to saltwater intrusion.

The Ohio State team worked with researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Saskatchewan to combine topographical data from satellites and climate models to show the flow of groundwater around the world’s coasts.

The findings could help coastal communities better protect and manage their drinking water.

“Freshwater-groundwater discharge is a natural line of defense against saltwater intrusion,” said Audrey Sawyer, assistant professor of earth sciences at Ohio State and a co-author of the study. “And saltwater intrusion is a concern in places like Miami, Georgia, Cape Cod—it’s up and down the coast. It’s a problem that dry regions have as little groundwater discharge as they do because these are also the places where people are going to tend to look for groundwater to meet their freshwater needs.”

Their work, the first near-global and spatially distributed high-resolution map of fresh groundwater flow to the coast, could give scientists better clues about where to monitor groundwater discharge. Such monitoring is more challenging than monitoring the water quality of a river or stream, because groundwater, by its nature, enters oceans and lakes under water—people can’t see it from land.

When researchers think about coastal water quality and the way water affects the biochemical makeup of the world’s lakes and oceans, they typically think about rivers and streams—and for good reason. Most of the water that gets to lakes and oceans comes from surface water sources. But groundwater plays and important role, too, carrying minerals and, in some cases, pollutants, to surface bodies of water.

“If you’ve ever been swimming in a lake or in the ocean in the summertime and you go through a cold patch, that is probably a place where groundwater is coming out,” Sawyer said. “And that’s just one way that groundwater affects surface water—in that case, it’s affecting temperature, but it also affects the chemistry of the water. These effects can be hard to measure over large scales.”

That’s why Sawyer’s team started building these images: The research group focuses on groundwater, and realized that there was limited information showing—in detail—where groundwater was most likely to flow into the oceans.

The study found that in some parts of the world, groundwater could be polluting oceans and lakes with nutrients and other chemicals.

Groundwater, for example, can carry higher concentrations of nitrates—a key contributor of the types of harmful algal blooms that have caused problems for both fish and drinking water in Lake Erie, the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico—as well as high concentrations of mercury. Understanding how and where groundwater gets to surface water could help policymakers create better plans to improve those bodies of water.

The study also found that climate heavily influences groundwater flow, and that cities in dry areas are especially vulnerable to saltwater contamination of aquifers.

“This study draws attention to the idea that surface water and groundwater are all connected, and if you start to extract groundwater, you’re affecting that connection to our surface water bodies, and that can affect surface water quality, too,” Sawyer said. “There is competition between the outward push of groundwater towards the coast and the saltwater that wants to come in, and if we don’t have as much of an outward push because we’re taking that fresh groundwater out of the ground instead of letting it flow to the coast, it puts us in a more vulnerable position. It’s not that we can’t use groundwater, but we need to monitor our impact and remember that groundwater is not an inexhaustible resource.”

In a study published this month in the journal Batteries and Supercaps, researchers from The Ohio State University detailed their findings centering around the construction of the battery’s cathode, which stores the energy produced by a chemical reaction in a metal-oxygen or metal-air battery. The finding, the researchers say, could make renewable energy sources like solar and wind more viable options for the power grid through cheaper, more efficient energy storage.

“If you want to go to an all-renewable option for the power grid, you need economical energy storage devices that can store excess power and give that power back out when you don’t have the source ready or working,” said Vishnu-Baba Sundaresan, co-author of the study and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State. “Technology like this is key, because it is cheap, it doesn’t use any exotic materials, and it can be made anywhere and promote the local economy.”

Renewable energy sources don’t emit carbon dioxide, so they don’t contribute to global warming—but they provide energy only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. In order for them to be reliable sources of power for a region’s energy grid, there needs to be a way to store excess energy gathered from sunshine and wind.

Companies, scientists and governments around the world are working on storage solutions, ranging from lithium-ion batteries—bigger versions of those in many electric vehicles—to giant batteries the size of a big-box store made using the metal vanadium.

Potassium-oxygen batteries have been a potential alternative for energy storage since they were invented in 2013. A team of researchers from Ohio State, led by chemistry professor Yiying Wu, showed that the batteries could be more efficient than lithium-oxygen batteries while simultaneously storing about twice the energy as existing lithium-ion batteries. But potassium-oxygen batteries have not been widely used for energy storage because, so far, they haven’t been able to recharge enough times to be cost-effective.

As teams tried to create a potassium-oxygen battery that could be a viable storage solution, they kept running into a roadblock: The battery degraded with each charge, never lasting longer than five or 10 charging cycles—far from enough to make the battery a cost-effective solution for storing power. That degradation happened because oxygen crept into the battery’s anode—the place that allows electrons to charge a device, be it a cell phone or a power grid. The oxygen caused the anode to break down, making it so the battery itself could no longer supply a charge.

Paul Gilmore, a doctoral candidate in Sundaresan’s lab, began incorporating polymers into the cathode to see if he might be able to protect the anode from oxygen. If he could find a way to do that, he thought, it would give potassium-oxygen batteries a shot at longer lives. It turned out he was right: The team realized that swelling in the polymer played a vital role in its performance. The key, Gilmore said, was finding a way to bring oxygen into the battery—necessary for it to work—without allowing oxygen to seep into the anode.

This design works a bit like human lungs: Air comes in to the battery through a fibrous carbon layer, then meets a second layer that is slightly less porous and finally ends at a third layer, which is barely porous at all. That third layer, made of the conducting polymer, allows potassium ions to travel throughout the cathode, but restricts molecular oxygen from getting to the anode. The design means that the battery can be charged at least 125 times—giving potassium-oxygen batteries more than 12 times the longevity they previously had with low-cost electrolytes.

The finding shows that this is possible, but the team’s tests haven’t proven that the batteries can be made on the scale necessary for power-grid storage, Sundaresan said. However, it does show potential.

Gilmore said potential may also exist for potassium-oxygen batteries to be useful in other applications.

“Oxygen batteries have higher energy density, which means they can improve the range of electric vehicles and battery life of portable electronics, for example, though other challenges must be overcome before potassium-oxygen batteries are viable for these applications,” he said.

And the finding offers an alternative to lithium-ion batteries and others that rely on cobalt, a material that has been called “the blood diamond of batteries.” The mining of the material is so troubling that major companies, including TESLA, have announced their plans to eliminate it from batteries entirely.

“It is very important that batteries intended for large-scale applications do not use cobalt,” Sundaresan said.

And it is also important that the battery can be made cheaply. Lithium-oxygen batteries—a possible energy storage solution that is widely considered one of the most viable options—can be expensive, and many rely on scarce resources, including cobalt. The lithium-ion batteries that power many electric cars cost around $100 per kilowatt hour at the materials level.

The researchers estimated that this potassium-oxygen battery will cost about $44 per kilowatt hour.

“When it comes to batteries, one size does not fit all,” Sundaresan said. “For potassium-oxygen and lithium-oxygen batteries, the cost has been prohibitive to use them as grid power backup. But now that we’ve shown that we can make a battery this cheap and this stable, then it makes it compete with other technologies for grid power backup.

“If you have a smallish battery that is cheap, then you can talk about scaling it up. If you have a smallish battery that is $1,000 a pop, then scaling it up is just not possible. This opens the door for scaling it up.”

This work was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Decades from now, the way people move through their daily lives will likely look even more different—and a new program in the partnership between The Ohio State University and Honda R&D Americas is working to nurture the kinds of innovative ideas that will, hopefully, make transportation easier, safer and more environmentally friendly.

Ohio State’s Office of Research hosted a pitch day recently at the newly opened 99P Innovation Laboratory on Kinnear Road and heard ideas to improve transportation from research groups from across the university. Seed funding was provided by the Office of Research, the College of Engineering and Honda. 

“We’re really at an inflection point where things in the world of mobility are changing pretty rapidly,” said Alissa Comella, the university’s co-director of the Honda-Ohio State partnership. “We have the opportunity, by partnering with Honda, to really have a unique vantage point on taking commercial thinking and academic thinking and bringing them together to look at what the future could be.”

A panel of engineers, scientists and others from both Honda and Ohio State evaluated those pitches and offered seed funding to five projects. The proposals varied from creating better, more sustainable, high-energy lithium batteries, to building a “smart” roadway that can tell drivers, pedestrians and cyclists what’s happening outside their line of sight, to social-work outreach to create a framework for testing, reviewing, and enhancing mobility innovations for older adults and individuals with disabilities.

The seed funding—$25,000 to each project—will allow teams to begin research and have development updates for the 99P Lab’s official unveiling this fall.

“99P creates a place for our researchers to stretch their ideas, and to try something they might not have tried before, to improve mobility for decades to come,” said Morley Stone, Ohio State’s senior vice president for research, “and they benefit from the real-world expertise of Honda’s research and development team. It’s a win-win.”

Mike Wiseman, senior director of research at Honda R&D Americas, said this expansion of the partnership is a win-win for Honda, too.

“We’ve been investing in student-driven innovation for decades, but we haven’t always had Ohio State principal investigators and other faculty and staff engaged at an essential level,” Wiseman said. “The goal was really to give research leaders a new space for their teams to bring their research to life as working products.”

And the partnership could help Honda move into the future with fresh ideas.

“Honda is more than an automaker. We’re a mobility company that’s proud of the fact that we extend beyond automobiles and motorcycles—into robotics and other areas,” said Jonathan Dayka, a Honda spokesman. “We really wanted this collaboration to continue to increase our concept of mobility, not just our development capability.”

The research groups that received funding include:

• A team led by Jung Hyun Kim, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State, will work on building thicker electrode technology to develop a higher-energy lithium-ion battery to power electrical vehicles. The goal, the researchers said, is to make lithium-ion batteries cheaper and more efficient, allowing more vehicles in the future to move away from being powered by petroleum products that contribute to climate change.
• A team led by Holly Dabelko-Schoeny, associate professor of social work, will focus on creating a framework for testing, reviewing and enhancing mobility innovations for older adults and individuals with disabilities. 
• A team led by Anish Arora, professor of computer science and engineering, will examine ways to build sensors into roadways, bikeways and walkways that can notify drivers, cyclists and pedestrians about other travelers and objects outside their lines of sight. “If roads could talk, what would they do to help us stay safe?” Anora said at the pitch day.
• A team led by Shawn Midlam-Mohler, associate professor of practice in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering, plans to build a better way to evaluate the user experience in autonomous vehicles.
• A team led by Robert Lee, professor of electrical and computer engineering, intends to build a “smart” steering wheel that can support distracted-driver detection by sensing a driver’s hands not just on—but near—the steering wheel.

The 99P Lab’s “grand opening” will be held this fall.

The discovery, nearly 30 years in the making, was published recently in the Bulletin of Geosciences and provides a clue as to how creatures were able to make the evolutionary leap from living stuck to marine sediment grains—which were held together by gooey algae-like colonies, the original way that echinoderms lived—to living attached to hard, shelly surfaces, which is the way their modern-day descendants live now on the bottom of the ocean.

“It throws light on a critical time, not just in the evolution of organisms, but also in the evolution of marine ecosystems,” said Loren Babcock, co-author of the study and professor of earth sciences at Ohio State. “This represents a creature that clearly was making the leap from the old style of marine ecosystems in which sediments were stabilized by cyanobacterial mats, to what ultimately became the present system, with more fluidized sediment surfaces.”

The creature, a species of edrioasteroid echinoderm that Babcock and his researchers named Totiglobus spencensis, lived in the Cambrian Period—about 507 million years ago. (The Earth, for the record, is about 4.5 billion years old.) A family of fossil hunters discovered the fossil in shale of Spence Gulch, in the eastern part of Idaho, in 1992, and donated it to Richard Robison, a researcher at the University of Kansas and Babcock’s doctoral adviser. That part of the country is rich with fossils from the Cambrian period, Babcock said.

For years, the fossil puzzled both Babcock and Robison. But the mystery was solved a few years ago, when Robison’s fossil collection passed to Babcock after Robison’s retirement.

Once Babcock had the fossil in his lab, he and a visiting doctoral student, Rongqin Wen, removed layers of rock, exposing a small, rust-colored circle with numerous tiny plates and distinct arm-like structures, called ambulcra. Further study showed them that the animal attached itself to a small, conical shell of a mysterious, now-extinct animal called a hyolith using a basal disk—a short, funnel-like structure composed of numerous small calcite plates.

The discovery was a type of scientific poetry—years earlier, Babcock and Robison discovered the type of shell that this animal appeared to be attached to, and named it Haplophrentis reesei.

The edrioasteroid that Babcock and Wen discovered apparently lived attached to the upper side of the elongate-triangular hyolith shell, even as the hyolith was alive. They think a sudden storm buried the animals in a thick layer of mud, preserving them in their original ecological condition.

Echinoderms and hyoliths first appeared during the Cambrian Period, a time in Earth’s history when life exploded and the world became more biodiverse than it had ever been before. The earliest echinoderms, including the earliest edrioasteroids, lived by sticking to cyanobacterial mats—thick, algae-like substances that covered the Earth’s waters. And until the time of Totiglobus spencensis, echinoderms had not yet figured out how to attach to a hard surface.

“In all of Earth’s history, the Cambrian is probably the most important in the evolution of both animals and marine ecosystems, because this was a time when a more modern style of ecosystem was first starting to take hold,” Babcock said. “This genus of the species we discovered shows the evolutionary transition from being a ‘mat-sticker’ to the more advanced condition of attaching to a shelly substrate, which became a successful model for later species, including some that live today.”

In the early part of the Cambrian Period—which started about 538 million years ago—echinoderms likely lived on that algae-like substance in shallow seas that covered many areas of the planet. The algae, Babcock said, probably was not unlike the cyanobacterial mats that appear in certain lakes, including Lake Erie, each summer. But at some point, those algae-like substances became appealing food for other creatures, including prehistoric snails. During the Cambrian, as the population of snails and other herbivores exploded, the algae-like cyanobacterial mats began to disappear from shallow seas, and sediments became too physically unstable to support the animals—including echinoderms—that had come to rely on them.

Once their algae-like homes became food for other animals, Babcock said, echinoderms either had to find new places to live or perish.

Paleontologists knew that the creatures had somehow managed to survive, but until the Ohio State researchers’ discovery, they hadn’t seen much evidence that an echinoderm that lived this long ago had made the move from living stuck to cyanobacterial-covered sediment to living attached to hard surfaces.

“This evolutionary choice—to move from mat-sticker to hard shelly substrate—ultimately is responsible for giving rise to attached animals such as crinoids,” Babcock said. “This new species represents the link between the old lifestyle and the new lifestyle that became successful for this echinoderm lineage.”

The study, published online in the journal Environmental Sciences: Process Impacts, is the first of its kind to show that microbes can break down these chemicals, called phthalates. Microbes grow rapidly in humid environments, breaking down harmful chemicals as they grow. But that humidity—and that microbial growth—could cause even more problems, including mold and musty air, the study found.

Still, the study is a starting point to understanding how to deal with harmful chemicals indoors.

“Previously, people thought there really wasn’t a lot of microbial activity happening in the indoor environment,” said Karen Dannemiller, director of the Indoor Environmental Quality Laboratory at The Ohio State University and co-author of the study. “We knew microbes were shed from human skin or tracked in from outdoors, and we thought they sat there and didn’t do anything. This study shows that is not always the case.”

Instead, the researchers found, those microbes are eating away at potentially harmful chemicals in dust—chemicals that are part of everyday, modern life.

Phthalates are most commonly used to make plastics and vinyl. They are present in some fragrances, many adhesives and certain shampoos and other personal care products. The term covers an entire group of chemicals, and studies have shown that they can affect the human endocrine system, which includes human reproductive organs. One such chemical, di-ethylhexyl phthalate—DEHP—can cause cancer.

“We should care about these chemicals because they have public health implications,” said Ashleigh Bope, co-author of the study and a PhD student in environmental science at Ohio State. “And we know that these chemicals can be degraded in other systems—like aquatic systems and soils—but we have high exposure to them indoors, so it was important for us to see if biodegradation was actually occurring in the indoor environment.”

All of that was on the researchers’ minds when they started looking into ways phthalates might break down indoors. They started by taking a piece of carpet—worn, medium-pile, made of nylon—from a family home in Massachusetts. They also collected pieces of carpet from three homes in Ohio, and took samples of dust from vacuum cleaner bags from those same homes.

In the lab, they examined the dust to see what existed in it. They found microbes, of course, and phthalates. One phthalate appeared in higher levels than the others: DEHP—the cancer-causing phthalate. Then, they stored the pieces of carpet at varying levels of humidity to see how the microbes and phthalates might interact.

They found that the higher the humidity, the more the microbes grew—and the more phthalates they destroyed. Moisture was necessary to jump-start the microbes, and though getting rid of the chemicals might be a good thing, it might also cause additional problems, said Sarah Haines, co-author of the study and a graduate student in environmental science in Dannemiller’s lab.

The researchers kept the carpet at relative humidity ranging from 50 to 100 percent—much higher than the humidity levels of a normal home. (The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recommends homes stay between 30 and 50 percent relative humidity.) At higher humidity levels, microbial activity explodes. Mold grows. Other fungi form.

“We could see that the phthalates were degrading, but the byproducts of that degradation could be even more harmful,” Haines said. “We really need to look at that more, especially at those elevated relative humidity conditions. It’s not recommended to maintain a high relative humidity in your home due to increased potential for microbial growth.”

Dannemiller, who is an assistant professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at Ohio State, said this study sets the stage for creating better indoor environments in the future that can protect people from both chemicals and microbes.

“The big picture is that understanding these interactions can eventually lead to better building design to prevent exposure to some of these harmful compounds,” she said. “We know that both chemicals and microbes are there, so how can we create the healthiest buildings that we possibly can?”

Runners constantly—and unconsciously—make minor corrections to their running form to keep their bodies upright, a recent study has found.

“You might think running is just a repetition of identical steps, and it might look like that to the naked eye,” said Nidhi Seethapathi, lead author of the study. “But actually, there are really small errors that happen when you run, and you have to constantly correct to avoid falling down. Our muscles and our senses are not perfect, and that leads to errors. If we didn’t correct for these self-generated errors, we would fall. Our study investigates how people correct such errors.”

The study was part of Seethapathi’s doctoral thesis in mechanical and aerospace engineering at The Ohio State University and was published earlier this month in the journal eLife. She has since accepted a postdoctoral position at The University of Pennsylvania.

“The tasks that your body does almost subconsciously have all these tiny movements behind them,” said Manoj Srinivasan, a co-author of the study and associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State. “Those little movements were what we were looking to understand.”

To understand how humans run without falling, the research team put volunteers on a treadmill and had them run at three different constant speeds. The team monitored and measured motion in each runner’s torso, the placement of each footstep and the force with which the leg pushes against the ground. The volunteers were average runners—not couch potatoes, but not marathoners, either.

They found that those runners automatically corrected for minor deviations in the movement of their torsos—their center of mass—by making slight changes to the place each footstep landed and by making miniscule adjustments to the amount of force with which their leg hit the ground. Seethapathi and Srinivasan found that they could predict how runners would change their footsteps or force by noting changes in the location of their torsos.

They also found that runners, by and large, corrected imperfections in a step by their very next step, indicating that the human body has the ability to “fix” its running gait in order to stay upright. And their research showed that imperfections in a running stride that would have caused a runner to fall to the side were corrected more quickly than errors that would have caused a runner to topple forward or backward.

None of the errors examined in this study included external factors—a crack in pavement, for example, or a tree root on a trail. But what they did show was the human body’s great capacity for keeping itself upright while moving—something that robots, in general, struggle to do.

“We try to work at the intersection of robotics and human movement,” Seethapathi said, “in that we use metrics that are traditionally used in robotics on human movement and then take inspiration from humans to inform robotic movement.”

The study’s findings could be used to engineer robots that are able to walk or run without toppling over, or to build an exoskeleton that moves more intuitively with the human body, Srinivasan said.

“In terms of movement, humans are just vastly superior to current robots,” Srinivasan said. “Our research is sort of reverse engineering the human body to understand how humans and animals control their bodies to do these amazing tasks. While walking and running maybe don’t sound amazing to people—because it is something most humans do almost every day—there have been a lot of technical challenges to making a robot that can walk or run without falling over, or to building an exoskeleton, for example, that can help a human regain movement while recovering from a stroke.”

An exoskeleton is exactly what it sounds like: A mechanical skeleton, or parts of a skeleton, that people wear to help the human body do everything from lift heavy objects to regain movement after an injury or stroke.

This study builds on previous research in Srinivasan’s lab that examined the ways humans walk.

But at The Ohio State University’s first-ever climate change symposium today (March 22), professors from around the university offered possible solutions to some of the problems caused by climate change—and talked about the methods they are using to study the many different ways global warming will change our world.

“I believe that the greatest challenges of the 21^st century are two-fold: learning how to get along with each other on this planet, and learning how to get along with the planet on which we all depend,” said Lonnie Thompson, a climate researcher and distinguished university professor of earth sciences at Ohio State. “These two challenges deal with human behavior and are therefore closely related.”

More than 200 people attended the symposium at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. Professors talked about scientific research into the public health effects of climate change and the ways climate change affects ecosystems. They detailed the economic impacts of climate change, showcased art meant to inspire discussion about climate change and described the legal aspects of creating policies that protect the environment and help humans adapt.

There is no question that moving away from burning fossil fuels—coal, oil and natural gas—for energy will help stabilize the Earth’s climate, the researchers said.

But it will also require people to use energy more efficiently, and to find ways to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, said Jeff Bielicki, a professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering.

“We only have a dozen or so years to do this,” Bielicki said. “We need to be thinking about how we produce energy in ways that don’t just avoid emitting carbon dioxide, but actually reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”

That could mean planting more forests, capturing carbon dioxide and finding places to store it, and considering ways to boost natural processes of breaking down carbon dioxide in oceans and rocks.

“These are not just scientific, engineering and technical challenges,” Bielicki said. “These are also policy and social science challenges.”

And that means modifying human behavior, not just to slow or stop climate change, but also to adapt to it. City governments—including Columbus—are already working on plans for how best to adapt to climate change, but changing human behavior is tricky.

“But if we’re thinking about climate change, we have to also be thinking about human behavior,” said Robyn Wilson, an associate professor of risk analysis and decision science.

For example, Wilson said, researchers at Ohio State are working on ways to help farmers modify their farming practices in a changing climate. Agricultural runoff contributes to cyanobacteria—toxic algae—in Lake Erie.

Researchers from across Ohio State are working on climate change issues, and the symposium was designed to bring them together, both to share ideas and to share their work.

“Climate impacts the decisions we make on a daily basis about every aspect of our lives,” said Jan Weisenberger, senior associate vice president for research at Ohio State. “If we think about the big problems that are going to be facing humanity in the next century and beyond, all of them intersect with climate.”

A research team at The Ohio State University has discovered a way to simplify how electronic devices use those electrons—using a material that can serve dual roles in electronics, where historically multiple materials have been necessary.

The team published its findings today, March 18, in the journal Nature Materials.

“We have essentially found a dual-personality material,” said Joseph Heremans, co-author of the study, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and Ohio Eminent Scholar in Nanotechnology at Ohio State. “It is a concept that did not exist before.”

Their findings could mean a revamp of the way engineers create all different kinds of electronic devices. This includes everything from solar cells, to the light-emitting diodes in your television, to the transistors in your laptop, and to the light sensors in your smartphone camera.

Those devices are the building blocks of electricity: Each electron has a negative charge and can radiate or absorb energy depending on how it is manipulated. Holes—essentially, the absence of an electron—have a positive charge. Electronic devices work by moving electrons and holes—essentially conducting electricity.

But historically, each part of the electronic device could only act as electron-holder or a hole-holder, not both. That meant that electronics needed multiple layers—and multiple materials—to perform.

But the Ohio State researchers found a material—NaSn2As2, a crystal that can be both electron-holder and hole-holder—potentially eliminating the need for multiple layers.

“It is this dogma in science, that you have electrons or you have holes, but you don’t have both. But our findings flip that upside down,” said Wolfgang Windl, a professor of materials science and engineering at Ohio State, and co-author of the study. “And it’s not that an electron becomes a hole, because it’s the same assembly of particles. Here, if you look at the material one way, it looks like an electron, but if you look another way, it looks like a hole.”

The finding could simplify our electronics, perhaps creating more efficient systems that operate more quickly and break down less often.

Think of it like a Rube Goldberg machine, or the 1960s board game Mouse Trap: the more pieces at play and the more moving parts, the less efficiently energy travels throughout the system—and the more likely something is to fail.

“Now, we have this new family of layered crystals where the carriers behave like electrons when traveling within each layer, and holes when traveling through the layers. … You can imagine there might be some unique electronic devices you could create,” said Joshua Goldberger, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Ohio State.

The researchers named this dual-ability phenomenon “goniopolarity.” They believe the material functions this way because of its unique electronic structure, and say it is probable that other layered materials could exhibit this property.

“We just haven’t found them yet,” Heremans said. “But now we know to search for them.”

The researchers made the discovery almost by accident. A graduate student researcher in Heremans’ lab, Bin He, was measuring the properties of the crystal when he noticed that the material behaved sometimes like an electron-holder and sometimes like a hole-holder—something that, at that point, science thought was impossible. He thought perhaps he had made an error, ran the experiment again and again, and got the same result.

“It was this thing that he paid attention and he didn’t assume anything,” Heremans said.

Bin He has since accepted a postdoctorate position at the Max Planck Institute in Dresden, Germany.

This work was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation.

A recent study by a team at The Ohio State University is offering new clues about the science behind those bandages, and researchers say the findings could help lead to better wound treatment.

The bandages belong to a class of therapies called electroceuticals, which are devices that use electrical impulses to treat medical issues such as wounds.

The study, published online recently in the journal Scientific Reports by a research team at The Ohio State University, is the first of its kind to look at the ways electroceutical bandages kill bacteria around a wound, allowing wounds to heal faster. Electroceutical bandages have been used to treat wounds since at least 2013.

“The goal is to heal nonhealing or chronic wounds, and, if infection is present, to remove infection,” said Shaurya Prakash, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and co- author of the study. “And what we wanted to understand was the mechanism behind why these electroceutical treatments work to kill bacteria.”

Biofilms are small communities of microorganisms—including bacteria—that can live on the surface of the skin or a wound. The communities are held together by something called extracellular polymeric substances—EPS for short. The substances are generally made up of fats and proteins, and can create a protective barrier that keeps bacteria safe from traditional clinical treatment options, including antibiotics. That means that even with traditional antibiotic treatments, some skin infections can linger and prevent wounds from healing.

But electroceutical bandages made of the right materials can break through that barrier, Ohio State’s research shows, destroying bacteria and allowing wounds to heal faster. The team developed a new model to study soft-tissue infections to learn more about how the bandages work.

The Ohio State study used haboti silk, a common Japanese weave, in the bandages. They silk-screened silver lines onto the silk, and attached a small device to deliver electricity to the biofilm. When they applied the electrified bandage to bacteria-laden biofilm in the lab, the bacteria were destroyed.

The research team used electron microscopes to monitor the bacteria. They saw that the electric current disrupted the biofilm enough to begin destroying bacteria. They also saw that bacteria continued to die off two days after the electric current was turned off. Their theory, based on these experiments, is that the bandage and electric current produce a potent antimicrobial chemical—hypochlorous acid—that takes over and kills bacteria without harming the healthy skin nearby.

This recent study was conducted on bacteria and biofilms in vitro, essentially meaning in a petri dish rather than on a human or an animal. Prakash is quick to point out that the studies set the stage for further research—experiments that will help scientists better understand the reasons why biofilms work the way they do. That fundamental understanding will help improve the design of electroceutical bandages, he said.

But in the meantime, Prakash and his team sent a few prototypes to The Ohio State University College of Veterinary Medicine. Last year, veterinarians used the bandages to help heal an open sore on a dog with a wound that just wouldn’t get better, even while being treated with antibiotic medications.

“If infection is present, wounds will not heal,” Prakash said. “So we need to find a way to get through the biofilm to the bacteria.”

The dog arrived at Ohio State late in 2017 with an open, infected wound. Within a week of using the bandage, half of the wound had healed; within 11 days, the infection had cleared.

Those results are promising, Prakash said, but early. The team hopes to conduct additional studies and collaborate with microbiologists at Ohio State to further understand the reasons why these bandages successfully destroy bacteria when other treatment options have failed.

The research was funded by Ohio State’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science L-Pilot Program, which is funded by a multiyear Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the National Institutes of Health. The research has also received support from Ohio State’s Infectious Disease Institute.

The new telescope paves the way for a more accurate, more focused search for extraterrestrial life, according to researchers.

The study, by a team of astronomers at The Ohio State University, provides the most detailed estimates to date of the potential reach of the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope mission (nicknamed WFIRST.) It was designed by NASA and astronomers throughout the country to find new planets and research dark energy, the mysterious force that pervades otherwise empty space and that could hold the keys to understanding how the universe expands. Their work was published Feb. 25 in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

“We want to know what kind of planetary systems there are,” said Matthew Penny, lead author of the study and postdoctoral researcher in the Ohio State Department of Astronomy. “To do that, you need to not just look where the obvious, easy things are. You need to look at everything.”

The planets WFIRST is likely to find will be further from their stars than most planets found to date, Penny said. The mission will build on the work of Kepler, a deep-space telescope that found more than 2,600 planets outside our solar system. The Kepler mission ended Oct. 30, 2018.

“Kepler began the search by looking for planets that orbit their stars closer than the Earth is to our Sun,” Penny said. “WFIRST will complete it by finding planets with larger orbits.”

To find new planets, WFIRST will use gravitational microlensing, a technique that relies on the gravity of stars and planets to bend and magnify the light coming from stars that pass behind them from the telescope’s viewpoint.

This microlensing effect, which is connected to Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, allows a telescope to find planets orbiting stars thousands of light-years away from Earth—much farther than other planet-detecting techniques. But because microlensing works only when the gravity of a planet or star bends the light from another star, the effect from any given planet or star is only visible for a few hours once every few million years. WFIRST will spend long stretches of time continuously monitoring 100 million stars at the center of the galaxy.

Penny’s study predicted that about 100 of those not-yet-discovered planets could have the same or lower mass as Earth.

The new telescope will be able to map the Milky Way and other galaxies 100 times faster than the famous Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched in 1990.

The WFIRST mission, with a budget of around $3.2 billion, will scan a small piece of the universe—about 2 square degrees—at a resolution higher than any similar mission in the past. That resolution, Penny said, will allow WFIRST to see more stars and planets than any previous organized search.

“Although it’s a small fraction of the sky, it’s huge compared to what other space telescopes can do,” Penny said. “It's WFIRST's unique combination – both a wide field of view and a high resolution – that make it so powerful for microlensing planet searches. Previous space telescopes, including Hubble and James Webb, have had to choose one or the other.”

WFIRST, Penny said, should give astronomers, astrophysicists and others who study space significantly more information about more planets outside of our solar system.

“WFIRST will allow us to find types of planets that we haven't seen before now,” Penny said. “From WFIRST's microlensing survey, we will learn how frequently different types of planets are formed, and how unique our solar system is.”

So far, scientists have discovered about almost 700 planetary systems—also known as solar systems—containing more than one planet. And they have discovered some 4,000 planets. But even though humans have searched galaxies near and far for signs of life, the search mostly has found planets that are closer to their stars than Earth is to our Sun.

The “infrared” piece of the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope is also important, Penny said.

“Infrared light allows WFIRST to see through dust that lies in the plane of the Milky Way in between us and the galactic center, something optical telescopes on the ground cannot do,” he said. “This gives WFIRST access to parts of the sky that are more densely packed with stars.”

Ohio State has played an important role in WFIRST, from the project’s inception to the design of research programs the telescope will execute.

The mission is still in the planning stages; NASA announced plans to move forward with WFIRST in February of 2016, and began its initial planning in May of 2018.

For restaurants, though, conveying a sense of love could be as simple as picking a different menu font.

A recent study found that when restaurant diners read menus with healthy food options printed in a typeface that appears handwritten, they were more likely to believe that the food was better for their bodies, made of better ingredients, and prepared with more care than similar items printed in machine-style fonts.

“The handwritten typeface conveys love, and that sense of human touch feels even more salient,” said Stephanie Liu, co-author of the study and assistant professor of hospitality management at The Ohio State University. “It feels to the customer like there is more heart, more effort, and more love in it, even though it doesn’t cost any more money.”

The team’s findings were published Feb. 10 in the Journal of Business Research.

The researchers conducted online surveys and found that the positive-response phenomenon occurred only when customers perceived the restaurant or menu items as healthy or locally grown—when the restaurant’s brand was health-focused.

“This wouldn’t apply to a fast-food brand that sells low-quality hamburgers,” Liu said.

But a font that appeared handwritten, even if it had been produced by a computer and not actually written by hand, triggered the perception that extra love and care are imbued in the restaurant’s offerings.

Liu has a theory about why this might be: The world is growing ever-more automated and ever-more mechanized. Technology can put distance between humans and occasionally remove the warmth that comes with human touch.

Handwriting can convey that warmth, because it requires more effort than typewritten font. A handwritten note, for example, is more personal than one typed on a computer. A typeface that appears handwritten, with imperfect curves and slants and organic strokes, conveys a deeper sense of emotional connection than machine-written typeface, which is typically squared, straight and uniform.

“As a marketing strategy, customers are just subconsciously processing information, and they feel that human touch in the letters on the menu,” Liu said. “And they feel that the restaurant put more effort into the design of this menu and they are getting this product to you with more care.”

Handwritten typeface might also help solo diners feel slightly less lonely, the researchers found, creating a sense of warmth and connection with the restaurant that could inspire those customers to return.

The researchers found that when customers believed the menu contained “love,” those customers were more likely to interact with the restaurant’s brand on social media, Liu said.

This research was funded by the Marriott Foundation.

Dorota Grejner-Brzezinska, associate dean for research in Ohio State’s College of Engineering, was one of 86 new members to receive the honor this year. Grejner-Brzezinska is also a professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geodetic Engineering.

The Academy cited Grejner-Brzezinska’s contributions to “geodetic science and satellite navigation, including integration with artificial intelligence.”

“Dorota is both an extraordinary scholar and a consummate research leader,” said David B. Williams, dean of the Ohio State College of Engineering. “We are honored to have her in the College of Engineering and thoroughly delighted that her international research leadership has been recognized by the Academy.”

She is the 13^th faculty member from Ohio State to be elected to the NAE. Election to the academy is one of the highest professional distinctions an engineer can receive, and honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice or education,” and to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”

Grejner-Brzezinska’s early research helped build more reliable GPS navigation, adding to the body of work that would eventually allow for navigation systems to be built into today’s smartphones. In recent years, she and her research teams have built navigation systems that rely on artificial intelligence and image-based navigation rather than satellite systems alone, allowing for autonomous vehicle navigation and navigation and positioning in confined environments, where GPS signals are not available.

Grejner-Brzezinska came to Ohio State more than 20 years ago as a Fulbright Scholar from Poland intent on studying geodetic science, which, among other things, focuses on the size and shape of the Earth and the estimation of spatial coordinates—two keys to creating reliable global positioning systems. She went on to earn a Ph.D. and become a faculty member at the College of Engineering. She served as chair of the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geodetic Engineering for four years prior to becoming the associate dean for research in 2017. She also served as President of the Institute of Navigation (ION). She is an ION Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation.

She said she hopes her award inspires young female engineers.

“I have been there—not thinking that I can make it,” she said. “But what I can tell you is that some of my best students have always been women. And it means a lot to me to show the younger women that we can do it.

“And I hope this will be empowering to women, to say to themselves that they can do it because they are smart and there is really no limit to their talent and imagination. I would say to them: ‘You are all doing the right thing. Just trust your abilities and trust your work.’”

Grejner-Brzezinska and her class will be formally inducted at a ceremony during the academy’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 6.

An outline of how those elements form as stars grow and explode and fade and merge is detailed in a review article published Jan. 31 in the journal Science.

“The universe went through some very interesting changes, where all of a sudden the periodic table—the total number of elements in the universe—changed a lot,” said Jennifer Johnson, a professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University and the article’s author.

“For 100 million years after the Big Bang, there was nothing but hydrogen, helium and lithium. And then we started to get carbon and oxygen and really important things. And now, we’re kind of in the glory days of populating the periodic table.”

The periodic table has helped humans understand the elements of the universe since the 1860s, when a Russian chemist, Dmitri Mendeleev, recognized that certain elements behaved the same way chemically, and organized them into a chart—the periodic table.

It is chemistry’s way of organizing elements, helping scientists from elementary school to the world’s best laboratories understand how materials around the universe come together.

But, as scientists have long known, the periodic table is just made of stardust: Most elements on the periodic table, from the lightest hydrogen to heavier elements like lawrencium, started in stars.

The table has grown as new elements have been discovered—or in cases of synthetic elements, have been created in laboratories around the world—but the basics of Mendeleev’s understanding of atomic weight and the building blocks of the universe have held true.

Nucleosynthesis—the process of creating a new element—began with the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago. The lightest elements in the universe, hydrogen and helium, were also the first, results of the Big Bang. But heavier elements—just about every other element on the periodic table—are largely the products of the lives and deaths of stars.

Johnson said that high-mass stars, including some in the constellation Orion, about 1,300 light years from Earth, fuse elements much faster than low-mass stars. These grandiose stars fuse hydrogen and helium into carbon, and turn carbon into magnesium, sodium and neon. High-mass stars die by exploding into supernovae, releasing elements—from oxygen to silicon to selenium—into space around them.

Smaller, low-mass stars—stars about the size of our own Sun—fuse hydrogen and helium together in their cores. That helium then fuses into carbon. When the small star dies, it leaves behind a white dwarf star. White dwarfs synthesize other elements when they merge and explode. An exploding white dwarf might send calcium or iron into the abyss surrounding it. Merging neutron stars might create rhodium or xenon. And because, like humans, stars live and die on different time scales—and because different elements are produced as a star goes through its life and death—the composition of elements in the universe also changes over time.

“One of the things I like most about this is how it takes several different processes for stars to make elements and these processes are interestingly distributed across the periodic table,” Johnson said. “When we think of all the elements in the universe, it is interesting to think about how many stars gave their lives—and not just high-mass stars blowing up into supernovae. It’s also some stars like our Sun, and older stars. It takes a nice little range of stars to give us elements.”

Scientists concerned about sea level rise have long focused on Greenland’s southeast and northwest regions, where large glaciers stream iceberg-sized chunks of ice into the Atlantic Ocean. Those chunks float away, eventually melting. But a new study published Jan. 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the largest sustained ice loss from early 2003 to mid-2013 came from Greenland’s southwest region, which is mostly devoid of large glaciers.

“Whatever this was, it couldn’t be explained by glaciers, because there aren’t many there,” said Michael Bevis, lead author of the paper, Ohio Eminent Scholar and a professor of geodynamics at The Ohio State University. “It had to be the surface mass—the ice was melting inland from the coastline.”

That melting, which Bevis and his co-authors believe is largely caused by global warming, means that in the southwestern part of Greenland, growing rivers of water are streaming into the ocean during summer. The key finding from their study: Southwest Greenland, which previously had not been considered a serious threat, will likely become a major future contributor to sea level rise.

“We knew we had one big problem with increasing rates of ice discharge by some large outlet glaciers,” he said. “But now we recognize a second serious problem: Increasingly, large amounts of ice mass are going to leave as meltwater, as rivers that flow into the sea.”

The findings could have serious implications for coastal U.S. cities, including New York and Miami, as well as island nations that are particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels.

And there is no turning back, Bevis said.

“The only thing we can do is adapt and mitigate further global warming—it’s too late for there to be no effect,” he said. “This is going to cause additional sea level rise. We are watching the ice sheet hit a tipping point.”

Climate scientists and glaciologists have been monitoring the Greenland ice sheet as a whole since 2002, when NASA and Germany joined forces to launch GRACE. GRACE stands for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, and involves twin satellites that measure ice loss across Greenland. Data from these satellites showed that between 2002 and 2016, Greenland lost approximately 280 gigatons of ice per year, equivalent to 0.03 inches of sea level rise each year. But the rate of ice loss across the island was far from steady.

Bevis’ team used data from GRACE and from GPS stations scattered around Greenland’s coast to identify changes in ice mass. The patterns they found show an alarming trend—by 2012, ice was being lost at nearly four times the rate that prevailed in 2003. The biggest surprise: This acceleration was focused in southwest Greenland, a part of the island that previously hadn’t been known to be losing ice that rapidly.

Bevis said a natural weather phenomenon—the North Atlantic Oscillation, which brings warmer air to West Greenland, as well as clearer skies and more solar radiation—was building on man-made climate change to cause unprecedented levels of melting and runoff. Global atmospheric warming enhances summertime melting, especially in the southwest. The North Atlantic Oscillation is a natural—if erratic—cycle that causes ice to melt under normal circumstances. When combined with man-made global warming, though, the effects are supercharged.

“These oscillations have been happening forever,” Bevis said. “So why only now are they causing this massive melt? It’s because the atmosphere is, at its baseline, warmer. The transient warming driven by the North Atlantic Oscillation was riding on top of more sustained, global warming.”

Bevis likened the melting of Greenland’s ice to coral bleaching: Once the ocean’s water hits a certain temperature, coral in that region begins to bleach. There have been three global coral bleaching events. The first was caused by the 1997-98 El Niño, and the other two events by the two subsequent El Niños. But El Niño cycles have been happening for thousands of years—so why have they caused global coral bleaching only since 1997?

“What’s happening is sea surface temperature in the tropics is going up; shallow water gets warmer and the air gets warmer,” Bevis said. “The water temperature fluctuations driven by an El Niño are riding this global ocean warming. Because of climate change, the base temperature is already close to the critical temperature at which coral bleaches, so an El Niño pushes the temperature over the critical threshold value. And in the case of Greenland, global warming has brought summertime temperatures in a significant portion of Greenland close to the melting point, and the North Atlantic Oscillation has provided the extra push that caused large areas of ice to melt".

Before this study, scientists understood Greenland to be one of the Earth’s major contributors to sea-level rise—mostly because of its glaciers. But these new findings, Bevis said, show that scientists need to be watching the island’s snowpack and ice fields more closely, especially in and near southwest Greenland.

GPS systems in place now monitor Greenland’s ice margin sheet around most of its perimeter, but the network is very sparse in the southwest, so it is necessary to densify the network there, given these new findings.

“We’re going to see faster and faster sea level rise for the foreseeable future,” Bevis said. “Once you hit that tipping point, the only question is: How severe does it get?”

Co-authors on the study include researchers from Ohio State, the University of Arizona, DTU Space in Denmark, Princeton University, the University of Colorado, University of Liége in Belgium, Utrecht University in the Netherlands, University of Luxembourg and UNAVCO, Inc.

And while our faces can convey a multitude of emotions—from anger to sadness to riotous joy—the number of ways our faces can convey different emotions varies. Disgust, for example, needs just one facial expression to get its point across throughout the world. Happiness, on the other hand, has 17—a testament to the many varied forms of cheer, delight and contentedness.

“This was delightful to discover,” said Aleix Martinez, cognitive scientist, professor of electrical and computer engineering at The Ohio State University, and study co-author, “because it speaks to the complex nature of happiness.”

The differences in how our faces convey happiness can be as simple as the size of our smiles or the crinkles near our eyes, the study found.

The study also found that humans use three expressions to convey fear, four to convey surprise, and five each to convey sadness and anger.

Those are the findings of a new study published online Jan. 14 in the journal IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

“Happiness acts as a social glue and needs the complexity of different facial expressions; disgust is just that: disgust,” Martinez said.

The findings build on Martinez’s previous work on facial expressions, which found that people can correctly identify other people’s emotions about 75 percent of the time based solely on subtle shifts in how blood flow colors a person’s nose, eyebrows, cheeks or chin.

In this study, Martinez and co-author Ramprakash Srinivasan, a doctoral student at Ohio State in Martinez’s lab, assembled a list of words that describe feelings—821 English words, to be exact. They then used those words to mine the internet for images of people’s faces. Professional translators translated those words into Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Farsi and Russian. To avoid bias, they used each word to download an equal number of images.

They plugged the words into search engines popular in 31 countries across North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Australia, and ended up with approximately 7.2 million images of facial expressions across a variety of cultures. The study did not include countries from the African continent or other remote parts of the world because of the limited number of candid images available from those areas.

Psychologists have debated how to classify human emotion for centuries. An ancient Chinese text—dating back as early as 213 B.C., then modified over the years—described seven “feelings of men” as joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, disliking and liking.

Martinez, whose research interests intersect both engineering and the behavior of the human brain, thought there had to be more than just seven or eight.

“To think that humans are only capable of eight emotions is absurd,” he said. “We are complex creatures. What about the different forms of joy? We experience the world on a much deeper level than just eight emotions.”

Martinez and Srinivasan hoped to identify the facial configurations that convey emotion across cultures. Based on computer algorithms, they found that the human face is capable of configuring itself in 16,384 unique ways, combining different muscles in different ways. They took the 7.2 million images their searches yielded and sorted them into categories, looking for those that expressed emotion across cultures. Martinez figured they’d find at least a few hundred.

They found only 35.

“We were shocked,” Martinez said. “I thought there would be way, way more.”

Since the number of universal expressions was smaller than expected, they wondered if most expressions of emotion were culture-specific. The result of this study surprised them even more. Analysis of the same dataset of 7.2 million images showed there are only eight expressions that are used in some—but not all—cultures. These eight expressions convey positive and negative affect, but not emotion categories like joy and anger. The researchers concluded that most facial expressions of emotion are universal, that there are only a few dozen of them and that a large number of them are used to express joyfulness.

Both Martinez and Srinivasan hold appointments in Ohio State’s Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Human Frontier Science Program.

In the game “Ghost,” players take turns saying letters, with each letter building on the last letter played. Players create word fragments, ultimately trying to get their opponents to complete the word. Whoever completes the word loses. At its core, though, Ghost is a game of collaboration—two players working together to build a word, even as they try to outsmart and outmaneuver each other, said Dustin Mixon, assistant professor of mathematics at The Ohio State University.

Mixon’s work focuses on geometric clustering, though he dabbles in game theory, and he has created theorems around gerrymandering in the past. He wondered if the same theory—two players with opposing goals working together to build a map—might make for more fair electoral districts.

“The effect we want is that we get a vote that reflects the will of the people,” Mixon said. “And just intuitively, if both sides have a role in drawing the map, it will be better than if only one side calls the shots. Any two-party game where two parties have a voice is going to be more equitable than a system where only one party has a voice.”

Mixon and his study co-author, Soledad Villar of New York University’s Center for Data Science, composed the theorem and posted it on a mathematics preprint server, arXiv.org, where other mathematicians can review it and weigh in on its validity before it is submitted to an academic journal.

To build a more equitable electoral map, Mixon theorizes, the two political parties simply need to play a game.

“In each round, a player assigns a precinct or a county to a voting district—and they take turns,” he said. “The theoretical result is that if you have half the votes, you’ll end up with half of the districts, no matter whether you are the first player or the second player.”

The theorem takes a few things for granted: It assumes, for example, that both parties are playing to win the maximum number of seats. It also assumes that the parties have perfect knowledge of how every voter would vote. It doesn’t take into account a third or fourth political party, or a back-room handshake that could protect one incumbent or another.

But it is, Mixon believes, a better system than the one in play right now.

As they ran through the possible outcomes in their proposed game, the mathematicians saw again and again that the number of seats each party won ended up reflecting the population of a given state—something that has come under scrutiny in recent elections, including in Ohio.

Gerrymandered districts have caused issues for elections for nearly 200 years, since the first gerrymandered district—drawn by Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry—created districts that tipped the balance of power in the state government to his party. The Boston Globe compared the district’s shape to a salamander; the combination of Gerry’s name and that description stuck, and the term “gerrymandering” was born.

Since then, the Supreme Court has weighed in on gerrymandering, going so far as to rule partisan gerrymandering unconstitutional in 1986. But determining if a district has been politically gerrymandered can be tricky—even districts that take wonky shapes can actually be more representative of the electorate than those drawn with clean, neat lines.

Ohio’s own electoral districts have come under fire: After the November election, Republicans won 52 percent of the overall votes for U.S. Congress, but will serve in about 69 percent of Ohio’s Congressional seats. But Ohio voters also voted overwhelmingly last year to put stronger controls in place to prevent gerrymandering, and to require buy-in from both Democrats and Republicans before district lines can be drawn.

That two-party planning is the foundation for Mixon’s theorem: If both parties are operating in their individual best interests, the resulting electoral map will be more fair than one drawn with just one party operating in its best interest.

“Twenty-one states have some sort of redistricting commission that they appoint to draw these maps, and those appointees are made by the party in power,” he said. “This improves on what we currently have.”

The finalized Columbus Climate Adaptation Plan will be presented to Columbus City Council and Mayor Andrew Ginther on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018.

BPCRC researchers collaborated with more than 75 local stakeholders and technical experts to develop the action plan, which outlines recommendations for adapting to extreme heat, deteriorating air and water quality, flooding, and other changes that are already occurring and likely to intensify with climate change. The report also addresses considerations for emergency preparedness and protecting vulnerable populations.

The recommendations are broken into two categories: necessary and aspirational.

“The ‘necessary’ recommendations are the bare minimum the city should do,” said Jason Cervenec, education and outreach director for BPCRC and chair of the task force. “They are the highest priority actions with the fewest barriers to implementation and the biggest return on investment.”

Those necessary recommendations include establishing a better network of centers where people can find refuge from extreme heat, modernizing the electric grid, and improving education around minimizing activities that contribute to some of climate change’s most pressing side effects – extreme heat, decreased air and water quality and increased flooding. The task force also recommends the city assess its stormwater infrastructure, regulations and technical documents, and make changes to decrease the risk of localized flooding and basement backups.

“Our goal has been to cast a wide net to provide the city with a comprehensive document that can best inform its operations and planning,” Cervenec said in early 2018, when the task force started collecting public comments. “While the city will need to decide how to address each of the actions recommended in the document, we believe it’s important to empower citizens, while there is time to act, with knowledge of the climate change impacts that experts agree are likely to occur.”

The report primarily focuses on public policy changes that could help central Ohioans adapt to new weather patterns caused by climate change, but it also “includes something for everybody,” Cervenec said.

“How does climate change affect my business, my nonprofit, my home, how I garden, how I make updates to my home or how I travel throughout our city?” he said. “It’s really about determining where climate change intersects your job, your interests and your life, and then making changes to reduce your risk and increase your resilience.”

The recommendations build upon a prior report, Climate Change in Columbus, Ohio, developed in 2016 through a collaboration among the university, the City of Columbus and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessment team.

The 2016 report that informed this action plan showed that average annual temperatures in Columbus rose by 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit from 1951 through 2012—higher than both national and global averages. At the same time, Columbus precipitation totals have risen nearly 20 percent and heavy storms are happening more than 30 percent more frequently.

Central Ohio is likely to see increasing temperatures—especially at night—along with flash-flooding and bouts of deteriorated water quality over the coming decades, according to the task force. The biggest risks come from warmer, wetter conditions for most of the year, with increased likelihood of flash-flooding and potentially more property damage in Columbus during the spring through fall.

Taken together, the projections suggest that young and elderly residents of central Ohio will be especially vulnerable to heat stress in summer. Homes and businesses will need to consume more electricity for air conditioning. And while Columbus is one of the fastest growing cities in the nation—with an expected influx of at least half a million people by 2035—construction companies will have to contend with workers laboring in extreme heat as they build new infrastructure.

Other cities around the country, including Chicago and Baltimore, have developed similar action plans. So have Toledo, Dayton, Cleveland and Cincinnati.

“Many cities are developing action plans, but I would argue that ours is one of the most comprehensive in the Midwest,” Cervenec said. “We first explored the climate impacts, risks and vulnerabilities facing Columbus and built the document to directly address those concerns.”