The findings, reported in the journal Science, have surprising and positive implications for the survival of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), which scientists had previously thought could be doomed because of the effects of climate change.

The unexpectedly fast rate of the rising earth may markedly increase the stability of the ice sheet against catastrophic collapse due to ice loss, scientists say.

Moreover, the rapid rise of the earth in this area also affects gravity measurements, which implies that up to 10 percent more ice has disappeared in this part of Antarctica than previously assumed.

Researchers led by scientists at The Ohio State University used a series of six GPS stations (part of the POLENET-ANET array) attached to bedrock around the Amundsen Sea Embayment to measure its rise in response to thinning ice.

The “uplift rate” was measured at up to 41 millimeters (1.6 inches) a year, said Terry Wilson, one of the leaders of the study and a professor emeritus of earth sciences at Ohio State.

In contrast, places like Iceland and Alaska, which have what are considered rapid uplift rates, generally are measured rising 20 to 30 millimeters a year.

“The rate of uplift we found is unusual and very surprising. It’s a game changer,” Wilson said.

And it is only going to get faster. The researchers estimate that in 100 years, uplift rates at the GPS sites will be 2.5 to 3.5 times more rapid than currently observed.

“These results provide an important contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of the Earth’s bedrock, along with the thinning of ice in Antarctica. The large amount of water stored in Antarctica has implications for the whole planet,” said lead study author Valentina R. Barletta, who started this work at Ohio State and now is a postdoctoral researcher at the National Space Institute (DTU Space) at the Technical University of Denmark.

“The new findings raise the need to improve ice models to get a more precise picture of what will happen in the future.”

While modeling studies have shown that bedrock uplift could theoretically protect WAIS from collapse, it was believed that the process would take too long to have practical effects.

“We previously thought uplift would occur over thousands of years at a very slow rate, not enough to have a stabilizing effect on the ice sheet. Our results suggest the stabilizing effect may only take decades,” Wilson said.

Wilson said the rapid rise of the bedrock in this part of Antarctica suggests that the geology underneath Antarctica is different from what scientists had previously believed.

Underneath the solid upper layer of Earth is a hotter and more fluid layer of rock called the mantle. Exactly how hot and fluid the mantle is varies across the planet.

The rapid uplift around the Amundsen Sea Embayment suggests that the mantle in this area is hotter and more fluid (or, as scientists say, it has lower viscosity) than expected, according to Barletta.

Barletta ran a variety of computer models using scenarios of ice loss through time in the area to explain how such rapid uplift could be occurring today.

The results of Barletta’s models showed that the GPS findings today could best be explained by having a low-viscosity mantle, Wilson said.

That would mean the bedrock reacts more quickly when the weight of ice is removed – which is exactly what the GPS results showed.

These new measurements of Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA), the scientific term for uplift due to ice sheet unloading, are an important part of a wider story about the fate of the Antarctic ice sheets, said Doug Kowalewski, the Antarctic Earth Sciences program director in the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs (OPP).

“The observed GIA response captured by the POLENET array is an order of magnitude greater than previously thought. The upcoming challenge is to couple the GIA observations with ice-sheet models,” Kowalewski said.

“These data will be of great value to the modeling community who examine the complex relationships between GIA, sub-ice shelf ocean circulation, and ultimately, ice sheet stability.”

The biggest practical effect of the uplift may be a rare bit of good news for what is happening in this part of Antarctica as a result of climate change, Wilson said.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet plays a key role in sea level rise. Estimates suggest this ice sheet alone accounts for one-fourth of global sea level rise that can be attributed to disappearing snow and ice.

Some scientists suggest that WAIS may have passed a tipping point in which ice loss can no longer be stopped, which could be catastrophic, Wilson said. The glaciers there contain enough water to raise global sea levels up to four feet.

The problem is that much of this area of Antarctica is below sea level. Relatively warm ocean water has flowed in underneath the bottom of the ice sheet, causing thinning and moving the grounding line – where the water, ice and solid earth meet – further inland.

The process seemed unstoppable, Wilson said. “But we found feedbacks that could slow or even stop the process.”

One important feedback involves “pinning points” – elevated features of the earth rising from the surface below the grounding line that pin the ice sheet to solid earth. These pinning points are going up in response to the uplift of the earth and could prevent further retreat of the ice sheet.

Another feedback is lowering sea levels. Massive ice sheets along the ocean have their own gravitational pull and raise the sea level near them. But as the ice thins and retreats, the gravitational pull lessens and the sea level near the coast goes down.

“The lowering of the sea level, the rising of pinning points and the decrease of the inland slope due to the uplift of the bedrock are all feedbacks that can stabilize the ice sheet,” Wilson said.

Other researchers had estimated how much the earth would have to rise to protect WAIS given a range of future climate warming scenarios.

Results of this study estimate that the bedrock at the Pine Island Glacier grounding line (which is part of WAIS) will have risen about 8 meters in 100 years. That is about three times higher than values shown by others to reduce run-away retreat in this area.

“Under many realistic climate models, this should be enough to stabilize the ice sheet,” Wilson said.

She said while this study delivers some potentially good news for the Amundsen Sea Embayment, that doesn’t mean all is well in Antarctica.

“The physical geography of Antarctica is very complex. We found some potentially positive feedbacks in this area, but other areas could be different and have negative feedbacks instead,” she said. Regardless of feedbacks, models suggest that the WAIS will collapse if future global warming is large.

Researchers from the University of Washington, University of Colorado-Boulder, TU Delft in the Netherlands, University of Texas, University of Memphis, Colorado State University, Penn State University and Washington University in St. Louis were also involved in the study.

This research was supported by the European Space Agency project GOCE + Antarctica, the NSF Office of Polar Programs Antarctic Earth Sciences Program and the U.S. Antarctic Program.

But new research found one common situation in which people would rather not discuss what they just bought: when they’re feeling like money is a little tight.

In a series of studies, researchers found that consumers who felt financially constrained didn’t want to talk about their purchases, large or small, with friends or strangers, face-to-face or online.

“It wasn’t about what other people might think or what they bought. Consumers who feel poor at the moment don’t want to talk about their purchases because it reinforces negative feelings about their unpleasant financial state,” said Anna Paley, lead author of the study and a visiting scholar in marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

One reason that the results are so interesting, Paley said, was because they could have gone in the other direction.

“One plausible theory was that consumers who felt poor would chat more about their purchases as a way to show their spending ability and validate their decision to spend the money,” she said. “But that’s not what we found.”

Paley emphasized that this study wasn’t about whether people were rich or poor. This was about the feeling that they didn’t have as much money as they wanted. “Millionaires can feel financially constrained too,” she said.

Paley conducted the study with Stephanie Tully of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California and Eesha Sharma of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. Their results appear online in the Journal of Consumer Research.

The researchers conducted seven studies.

In one study, the researchers found that participants who reported feeling financially constrained also were less likely to talk about products they bought with friends, family members and colleagues.

The results held even after taking into account the income of participants.

“This suggests that our results can’t be explained by differences in objective wealth,” Paley said.

A second study recruited online participants. They were told the study was about “what people talk about.” All of them answered questions probing how financially constrained they felt.

Participants had the choice of posting in one of two chat rooms – one called “recent purchases” and the other called “local/state parks.” The researchers chose this topic because in a previous study, a separate group of people had rated parks to be a less interesting topic than recent purchases.

Nearly two-thirds of participants chose to discuss recent purchases rather than parks. But participants who felt financially constrained were significantly more likely to post in the parks chat room.

“Consumers who felt poorer would rather talk about a less interesting topic than discuss what they bought recently,” Paley said.

The results held up in another study in which the researchers induced some participants to feel poorer by writing about aspects of their financial situation that made them feel like they didn’t have enough money.

These participants were less likely to say they would talk about an upcoming purchase than participants who wrote about another subject.

In this study, the researchers also asked participants to report on how talking about a purchase would make them feel about their financial situation.

“We found that financially constrained consumers expected less enjoyment from talking about their purchases because it would bring up negative feelings about their money situation,” she said.

The researchers found a few exceptions in other studies. When people thought about their purchases as expenditures of their time rather than expenditures of their money, even those who felt money was tight would talk about them. The same went for gifts and tickets to a free event.

The findings are important for marketers because consumers consistently rate word-of-mouth as one of the most trustworthy and credible sources of information about products and services, Paley said.

Their findings suggest some things marketers can do to encourage word-of-mouth.

“Word-of-mouth campaigns will be more effective if marketers can separate the cost of the item from the experience of sharing the purchase,” she said.

For example, many online retailers send people a receipt after a purchase with a request that they share about what they bought with friends on social media.

“If the money you spent is right there in front of you on your receipt and you’re feeling a little poor at the moment, you’re not going to want to share,” she said. “Marketers should consider separating receipts and sharing requests.”

That four-year boost – found in an analysis of more than 1,000 obits from around the country – was calculated after taking into account the sex and marital status of those who died, two factors that have strong effects on lifespan.

The boost was slightly larger (6.48 years) in a smaller study of obituaries published in a Des Moines, Iowa, newspaper.

“Religious affiliation had nearly as strong an effect on longevity as gender does, which is a matter of years of life,” said Laura Wallace, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in psychology at The Ohio State University.

The study was published online today in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

The researchers found that part of the reason for the boost in longevity came from the fact that many religiously affiliated people also volunteered and belonged to social organizations, which previous research has linked to living longer.

“The study provides persuasive evidence that there is a relationship between religious participation and how long a person lives,” said Baldwin Way, co-author of the study and associate professor of psychology at Ohio State.

In addition, the study showed how the effects of religion on longevity might depend in part on the personality and average religiosity of the cities where people live, Way said.

The first study involved 505 obituaries published in the Des Moines Register in January and February 2012. In addition to noting the age and any religious affiliation of those who died, the researchers also documented sex, marital status and the number of social and volunteer activities listed.

Results showed that those whose obit listed a religious affiliation lived 9.45 years longer than those who didn’t. The gap shrunk to 6.48 years after gender and marital status were taken into account.

The second study included 1,096 obituaries from 42 major cities in the United States published on newspaper websites between August 2010 and August 2011.

In this study, people whose obits mentioned a religious affiliation lived an average of 5.64 years longer than those whose obits did not, which shrunk to 3.82 years after gender and marital status were considered.

Many studies have shown that people who volunteer and participate in social groups tend to live longer than others. So the researchers combined data from both studies to see if the volunteer and social opportunities that religious groups offer might explain the longevity boost.

Results showed that this was only part of the reason why religious people lived longer.

“We found that volunteerism and involvement in social organizations only accounted for a little less than one year of the longevity boost that religious affiliation provided,” Wallace said. “There’s still a lot of the benefit of religious affiliation that this can’t explain.”

So what else explains how religion helps people live longer? It may be related to the rules and norms of many religions that restrict unhealthy practices such as alcohol and drug use and having sex with many partners, Way said.

In addition, “many religions promote stress-reducing practices that may improve health, such as gratitude, prayer or meditation,” he said.

The fact that the researchers had data from many cities also allowed them to investigate whether the level of religiosity in a city and a city’s “personality” could affect how religious affiliation influenced longevity.

The findings showed that a key personality element related to longevity in each city was the importance placed on conformity to community values and norms.

In highly religious cities where conformity was important, religious people tended to live longer than non-religious people.

But in some cities there is a spillover effect.

“The positive health effects of religion spill over to the non-religious in some specific situations,” Wallace said. “The spillover effect only occurs in highly religious cities that aren’t too concerned about everyone conforming to the same norms. In those areas, non-religious people tend to live as long as do religious people.”

Way said there are limitations to the study, including the fact that it could not control for important factors related to longevity such as race and health behaviors. But a potential strength was that, unlike other studies, religious affiliation was not self-reported, but was reported by the obituary writer.

Overall, the study provided additional support to the growing number of studies showing that religion does have a positive effect on health, Wallace said.

Other authors on the study were Rebecca Anthony, who is in her final year of medical school at Ohio State, and Christian End, associate professor of psychology at Xavier University.

The study was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Researchers found that people gave more positive reviews for their group’s performance on a task – and their own contribution – if they drank caffeinated coffee beforehand.

A second study showed that people talked more in a group setting under the influence of caffeinated coffee – but they also were more on-topic than those who drank decaf.

Coffee seems to work its magic in teams by making people more alert, said Amit Singh, co-author of the study and a doctoral student in marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

“Not surprisingly, people who drank caffeinated coffee tended to be more alert.”“We found that increased alertness was what led to the positive results for team performance,” Singh said.

Singh conducted the study with Vasu Unnava and H. Rao Unnava, both formerly at Ohio State and now with the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Davis. The study appears online in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

While many studies have looked at how caffeine affects individual performance, this is the first to examine the impact it has on teams, Singh said.

The first study involved 72 undergraduate students who said they were coffee drinkers. They were instructed not to drink coffee before the experiment.

Half of them first participated in what they were told was a coffee-tasting task. They were split into groups of five. After drinking a cup of coffee and rating its flavor, they were given 30 minutes of filler tasks to give the caffeine a chance to kick in. The other half of the participants did the coffee tasting at the end of the experiment.

Each group then read about and were asked to discuss a controversial topic – the Occupy movement, a liberal movement that highlighted social and economic inequality. After a 15-minute discussion, group members evaluated themselves and the other group members.

Results showed that those who drank the coffee before the discussion rated themselves and their fellow team members more positively than did those who drank coffee after the discussion, Singh said.

The second study was similar, except that 61 students all drank coffee at the beginning of the study. However, half drank decaf and the others drank caffeinated brew.

Those who drank caffeinated coffee rated themselves and their fellow group members more positively than those who drank decaf.

It had to do with alertness.

All participants rated how alert they felt at the end of the study, and those who drank the caffeinated coffee rated themselves as more alert than the others.

A key finding was that people who rated themselves as more alert – whether they drank caffeinated coffee or not – also tended to give higher marks to themselves and their fellow group members.

This suggests that any intervention that increases alertness (such as exercise) may also produce similar results, which the authors propose in the paper as a future research topic.

“We suspect that when people are more alert they see themselves and the other group members contributing more, and that gives them a more positive attitude,” Singh said.

But the caffeine does more than just increase good feelings. The researchers did an analysis of the group discussion in the second study, rating how much each group member talked and stayed on topic.

Results showed that people tended to talk more after drinking caffeine, but they also tended to stay more on topic.

“They’re talking about more relevant things after drinking caffeinated coffee,” he said.

One might think that if people are talking more about a controversial topic like the Occupy movement, that may cause friction in the group. But that’s not what the study suggests.

People who drank caffeinated coffee were more likely than those who drank decaf to say they would be willing to work with their group again.

“Even though they are talking more, agreeing and disagreeing, they still want to work with them again,” Singh said.

“Coffee didn’t seem to make group discussions too uncomfortable and disagreeable.”

In a series of eight studies, both in the lab and real life, researchers found that free time seems shorter to people when it comes before a task or appointment on their calendar.

“We seem to take a mental tax out of our time right before an appointment,” said Selin Malkoc, co-author of the study and associate professor of marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business

“We figure something might come up, we might need some extra time, even when there’s no need to do that. As a result, we do less with the available time.”

The study appears online in the Journal of Consumer Research.

In an online study of 198 people, Malkoc and her colleagues asked some participants to imagine they had a friend coming over to visit in one hour and “you are all ready for your friend to come by.” The others were told that they had no plans for the evening.

All participants were asked how many minutes “objectively” they could spend reading during the next hour and how many minutes they “subjectively” felt like they could spend reading during that same hour.

“Regardless of whether they had a friend coming by or not, participants said that they objectively had about 50 minutes available to read,” Malkoc said.

“That’s an amazing finding right there. Most people didn’t think even objectively they had a full hour to read. People are putting a little ‘just-in-case’ time into their schedules when there is no real reason to do that.”

When they were asked how much time they felt they had to read – the subjective measurement – those with a friend coming by felt that they had 10 more minutes missing in their hour – about 40 minutes.

The results held up in real-life studies as well.

The researchers asked participants recruited online to provide their actual schedules for the next day. Participants indicated when each scheduled task on their calendar would begin and how much time they would need before each task to prepare.

Participants were then offered the opportunity to take part in either a 30-minute or a 45-minute study on that day. The 30-minute study paid $2.50 and the 45-minute study paid twice as much: $5.

For some participants, the study was scheduled in the one hour before they said they had to start getting ready for their next appointment. The others were not scheduled up against another of their appointments.

Even though they had plenty of time to finish the 45-minute study, participants who had an appointment in an hour were significantly more likely than the others to choose the 30-minute study instead of the 45-minute version.

“It was clear they would have plenty of time to finish and have extra time before their next appointment, but they still were more likely to choose the 30-minute study – even when they had a clear financial incentive to choose the longer study,” Malkoc said.

People also seem to get more done when they don’t have a scheduled task hanging over their heads, the researchers found.

In a study of 158 college students, a researcher told participants when they arrived at the lab that study sessions were running faster than expected so she wanted to wait to see if more participants arrived.

Some participants were reminded that they had a task coming up soon: They were told “they had about five minutes before we could get started. You can do whatever you want before we will get started.”

Others weren’t reminded about their upcoming task and were simply told “they had about five minutes to do whatever you want.”

After the time had passed, all participants wrote down what they did during the five-minute interval. The students indicated they did things like sending a text message, checking email and visiting social media sites.

But those who weren’t reminded they had an upcoming task performed more activities (an average of 2.38) than those who were told they had a task soon (an average of 1.86).

“You don’t feel like you can get as much done when you have a task coming up soon. The time seems shorter,” Malkoc said.

These findings suggest that looming tasks on our calendar make us less productive, according to Malkoc.

“We feel that if we have a meeting in two hours, we shouldn’t work on any big projects. So we may spend time just answering emails or doing things that aren’t as productive,” she said.

That may explain why, on days when we have meetings spread throughout, we feel like we have accomplished little. The problem is that we aren’t maximizing the time in between those meetings, she said.

One solution, she said, is to try to stack all your meetings together. That way, you have longer, uninterrupted times when you feel you can tackle the bigger projects on your agenda.

It is also good to remind yourself of how much time you really do have available.

“We seem to overestimate the things that might happen to take up our time, so we don’t get things done,” she said.

Malkoc conducted the study with Gabriella Tonietto, assistant professor of marketing at Rutgers Business School-Newark and New Brunswick, and Stephen Nowlis, professor of marketing at Washington University’s Olin Business School.

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The lady salamander that shuns male companionship may reap important benefits.

For instance, when a predator snaps off her tail.

New research from The Ohio State University compared an all-female population of mole salamanders to a related heterosexual species and found they grew their tails back 36 percent faster. The unisexual salamanders (part of the Ambystoma genus) contain DNA of up to five species and reproduce primarily by cloning themselves.

Salamanders’ tails play a critical role in predator avoidance. As larvae, tails help them swim away. Once the animals are land-dwellers, the tails act as a distraction.

After accounting for weight and size differences – the all-female salamanders are larger and have more tail to grow back – the team concluded that the unisexual animals regenerated tail tissue at 1.5 times the rate of their heterosexual counterparts.

Robert Denton

“I don’t think we expected it to happen so fast,” said Robert Denton, co-author of the study and a graduate student in Ohio State’s Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology.

The study appears in the Journal of Zoology.

Populations of unisexual mole salamanders have survived millions of years through cloning. Because they aren’t mating with males (though they do mix things up by “borrowing” sperm left behind on leaves and twigs), their DNA stays relatively static.

And that might lead a salamander scientist to suspect the species would fizzle out. (Passing harmful genetic mutations to generation after generation could be bad.)

“I was wondering what makes them thrive, and there are some things that might point to them regenerating body parts at faster rates,” said Monica Saccucci, who led the study as an undergraduate at Ohio State.

Photo by Kevin Fitzsimons

Unisexual salamanders are polyploids, meaning they have more than two sets of chromosomes. This is relatively common in plants and occurs in some other animals, including goldfish. But most animals have two sets, one from mom and one from dad.

Scientists who study everything from tomatoes to humans understand that genetic differences can play significantly into how fast cells divide and tissue grows. But little research has looked at closely related salamanders with different reproduction strategies.

The research team collected egg masses from wetlands in rural Ohio and reared 10 unisexual salamanders and 30 smallmouth salamanders for comparison. Then the researchers removed a portion of the salamanders’ tails and monitored regrowth for four months.

Both groups regenerated at about the same rate up until three weeks after their tails were removed. (This was also the time most animals’ diets were upgraded from brine shrimp to larger plankton, but it’s unclear what role the nutrient shift might have played.)

Then the tails of the unisexual salamandersbegan to grow at a rate that outpaced their heterosexual counterparts. In about 10 weeks, the unisexuals had brand-new tails. It took the other salamanders another month or so.

The discovery illuminates how genetic differences can contribute to differences in regeneration rates that could amount to at least a partial explanation for the long-term survival of the hybrid unisexual salamanders, Saccucci said. And it shows a parallel between the small vertebrates and polyploid snails, which also regenerate after injury more quickly.

Denton said it remains unclear whether the faster regeneration is due to the genomic differences alone.

“Is it because they have more genomes or because they reproduce differently? We don’t know and it’s difficult to disentangle with these animals,” he said.

While the unisexual salamanders usually reproduce through cloning, they “borrow” salamander sperm from other species to stimulate egg production, a process called kleptogenesis.

“They can steal sperm from male salamanders and incorporate it into their genome. We don’t know exactly how that works, but it’s interesting,” Saccucci said.

Maintaining a species without males is efficient if you can pull it off, because all the females are able to create more animals without the usual complications of mating, Denton said.

Saccucci, now a medical student at the University of Cincinnati, was particularly interested in regeneration because of its promise in human medicine.

“I had salamanders to work with, and they can regenerate all kinds of structures – tails, digits, part of their heart, part of their eye. That piqued my interest,” she said.

In a salamander’s life, regeneration ranks high in importance.

“They get injured a lot,” Saccucci said. “If you can’t regenerate, you’re dead.”

The study was supported by a crowdfunding campaign through the SciFund Challenge and the Ohio Biodiversity Conservation Partnership.

Other researchers from Ohio State’s Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology who worked on the project are Matthew Holding, a graduate student, and H. Lisle Gibbs, a professor.

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