Author: admin

  • Learning from the life living in Superfund sites

    Learning from the life living in Superfund sites

    Credit: Andrew Lichtenstein/Getty

    Oil makes its way down the Gowanus Canal and into New York Harbor on Oct. 10, 2018, in Brooklyn, New York. A center of industrial cargo shipping in the 19th century, the Gowanus Canal is now an inhospitable place to most living organisms. Some microbes have found a way to thrive among the toxic stew of coal tar, wastewater, and heavy metal pollution.

    On a cool December day in Brooklyn, New York, in 2014, a group of academic and citizen scientists set off onto one of the most polluted 3 km stretches of water in the US. They’d soon find a thriving community of microbes living in toxic sludge about a meter below the water.

    One of those keen researchers was Elizabeth Hénaff, who had just joined Chris Mason’s laboratory at Weill Cornell Medicine as a postdoctoral fellow. Several months earlier, two members of the Brooklyn community biology lab Genspace had approached Mason with an intriguing proposal. They wanted to study the bottom of the Gowanus Canal, an infamously toxic body of water, before the US Environmental Protection Agency dredged its bottom and covered it with an impermeable layer.

    When she heard about the plan, Hénaff was hooked.

    Decked out in hazmat suits and rubber boots, Hénaff and the team paddled out into the canal, three people to a boat. When they reached their first sampling location, the person in the back operated a 4 m long polyvinyl chloride pipe, “our super scientific sampling device,” from a big-box hardware store, Hénaff says.

    A person in a black beanie canoes through a canal lined with residential and industrial buildings.

    Credit: Elizabeth Hénaff

    A group of researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine and Genspace canoe on the Gowanus Canal, with boats and arm power provided by the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club, on Dec. 12, 2014, to collect samples of the black sludge at the bottom of the canal. Microbes living in extreme environments like the Gowanus Canal have adapted to make use of environmental pollutants. Those same microbes could be used to clean up similar sites in the future, in a process known as bioremediation.

    After plunging the pipe into the soft sediment of muck below the water and capping the top with a gloved hand, the person at the stern gently pulled it out while maintaining the vacuum. The person at the front of the boat, ready for collection with a 50 mL centrifuge tube in hand, guided the black slop from pipe to tube once the vacuum was released.

    Back in the lab, the research team extracted and sequenced DNA found in that sludge. “At first it came as a surprise to me that there was anything living in there,” says Hénaff, now an assistant professor in computational biology at New York University. “Now I know. Of course there are microbes there; there are microbes everywhere.”

    Since 2014, Hénaff has studied the unseen microbiology of the Gowanus Canal. She and her team recently identified a community of more than 400 different species of bacteria, archaea, and viruses living in that sludge, and more than 1,000 genes that encode for proteins that process heavy metals (J. Appl. Microbiol. 2025, DOI: 10.1093/jambio/lxaf076).).

    The Gowanus Canal is a particularly contaminated area that the EPA declared a Superfund cleanup site in 2010. The origins of that designation are at Love Canalin Niagara Falls, New York, where during the 1970s, residents experienced high rates of birth defects, pregnancy losses, and cancer as a result of industrial dumping of contaminants like chlorinated hydrocarbons in a local landfill.

    The disaster brought the impacts of dumping hazardous waste to the forefront of the environmental movement and garnered widespread attention. To address the environmental and health concerns of hazardous waste sites such as Love Canal, the US Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation,and Liability Act in 1980. Part of that act established a $1.6 billion trust to clean up old waste sites, informally called Superfund sites.

    Abandoned industrial sites contaminated with petroleum chemicals, nuclear waste, pesticides, heavy metals, and other anthropogenic pollutants are poisoning the environment and wreaking havoc on public health.

    But while most organisms die off in such extreme environments, some microorganisms thrive. “These extremophiles have specific adaptations that let them tolerate the particular conditions they are in,” says Jeffrey Morris, an associate professor in microbiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. And in the case of polluted environments, those adaptations allow microbes to tolerate and degrade or otherwise detoxify environmental contaminants.

    “Bacteria grow really fast and can adapt to almost any kind of environment you throw at them, anything that doesn’t just kill them out right,” Morris says. “If you give them time around a pollutant, they’ll come up with solutions to grow better in its presence.”

    As researchers focused on hazardous waste sites, they began leveraging these microbes for cleanup, a process known as bioremediation. Early uses relied on microbes to clean up oil spills, such as the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon spill. Because oil exists naturally in the environment, microbial communities that know how to consume components of oil already exist: Oceanospirillales bacteria, which use hydrocarbons as a source of carbon and energy, are one example. Microbes in sites full of human-made pollution have more pressure to evolve.

    Each Superfund site is unique, with a distinct pollution history and dominant contaminants that offer scientists a “window into the process of evolution itself,” Morris says. What’s more, Morris and other researchers say, as they find new bacteria that survive in polluted sites, they can perhaps put those microbes to work. One day they may clean up pollution and do important, more sustainable chemistry. At some sites, bioremediation efforts are already under way.

    A microbial history lesson

    In New York, Hénaff’s team identified 455 freshwater and saltwater species of bacteria, archaea, and viruses, and identified 64 ways microbes degrade organic pollutants and 1,171 genes that encode for proteins that use or detoxify heavy metals.

    A building being demolished by demolition crews.

    Credit: Castle Light Images/Alamy Stock Photo

    The K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant campus, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 2019 during the demolition process. The site is contaminated with the common industrial solvent trichloroethylene.

    Hénaff identified microbes that can live in extremely salty environments, like sulfate-reducing Desulfobacterium autotrophicum, and heavy metal–contaminated environments, like Microbacterium laevaniformans. Her team also observed bacteria typically found in the human gut, which aligns with the frequent sewage overflows into the canal.

    Hénaff says you can see, via the microbes that the team detected, how the Gowanus Canal was plagued by industrial waste dumping and commercial shipping activities, resulting in a chemical soup of infamous pollutants. “One interesting takeaway is this idea of microbial memory that’s maintained by these nonhuman organisms,” Hénaff says. “It’s a memory of the history of human intervention in a site.”

    As a kid growing up in Brooklyn, just a few miles away from the Gowanus Canal, Lesley-Ann Giddings knew to avoid the notoriously toxic water. Years later, as a biochemistry professor at Middlebury College, Giddings set out to explore a different Superfund site, one plagued not by urban industrial pollution but by the legacy of mining that has left a microbial mark.

    The Ely Copper Mine located in the old Copper Belt region of Vermont is home to abandoned mining-waste piles that are packed with rocks rich in metal sulfides. The rock piles drain acidic water into surrounding groundwater and sediment, a process known as acid rock drainage. Water in this region is contaminated with toxic levels of copper, iron, magnesium, zinc, and lead, and in 2001, the EPA designated it a Superfund site. Intrigued by the possible microbial communities thriving in the hyperacidic environment, Giddings decided to go microbe hunting.

    A stream of yellow-tinted water flows through an abandoned mining site surrounded by wood debris.

    Credit: US Environmental Protection Agency

    Acid rock drainage carries sulfides in the Ely Brook to the Schoolhouse Brook on May 7, 2025, in Vershire, Vermont. Lesley-Ann Giddings hopes to find bioactive compounds by studying the microbial community in the hyperacidic environment of the Ely Brook at the Ely Copper Mine site.

    The bright orange soil that clung to her boots as she stepped out of her car and made her way past the mine tailings, a by-product of mining, made it “very clear that we were at this mine with a lot of oxidized metals,” says Giddings, now a professor at Smith College. Giddings focused on a brook near the mine’s entrance and, like Hénaff, relied on a DIY approach to collect samples for DNA sequencing.

    On a sunny summer day in 2015, Giddings and a small team hooked up a peristaltic pump to an old car battery, allowing them to pump water from the brook through filters that captured DNA. They later returned to the site a few more times over the next 4 years, in the winter and summer.

    “The acid rock drainage environment is very nutrient deficient,” Giddings says, so to identify the acid-loving microbes surviving in this inhospitable environment, her team used shotgun metagenomic sequencing, an analysis that sequences all microbial genomes in a sample.

    Hénaff’s team relied on the same sort of genetic analysis to make sense of the Gowanus sludge. To prepare samples for sequencing, the cellular membranes of the cells are cut open to release their DNA, which is then separated from cellular debris and chopped into pieces short enough for a sequencing instrument to handle.

    Hénaff describes the process as taking a “mixed bag of bacteria and their genes,” from a site sample and processing it down to “a mixed bag of small pieces of DNA, each 150 base pairs long.” After that, a DNA-sequencing instrument turns molecules into data ready for computational analysis, comparing data from the mixed bag of DNA fragments with those in databases listing the unique genetic material specific to a certain microbe or assigning function to specific genes.

    The Ely Brook microbiome that Giddings pieced together revealed a community of acid-tolerant bacteria, including Proteobacteria and Actinobacteria commonly found in metal-rich environments (PLOS One 2020, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0237599). The team also identified bacteria that oxidize iron and sulfur, which are in high concentrations in the brook, as well as others, like Bradyrhizobium species, which produce nutrients for plants by reducing nitrogen gas to usable ammonia. Other researchers have found Bradyrhizobium bacteria at a former nuclear weapons production facility, the Savannah River Superfundsite.

    But Giddings notes that the environment could have more microbes and genes that she wasn’t able to identify. Metagenomic analyses rely on previous research catalogued in existing databases to identify microbes and assign function to genes in a given sample, and because acid rock drainage environments are understudied, Giddings thinks there may be genes or microbes the analysis wasn’t able to label.

    Breathing, eating, and immobilizing pollutants

    Beyond identifying these pollution-gobbling microbes, understanding what they actually do in the presence of pollutants could pave the way for their use in bioremediation.

    In the 1990s, scientists discovered that waste- and groundwater contaminated with a common industrial solvent, trichloroethylene (TCE), contained Dehalococcoides bacteria. These bacteria dechlorinate TCE, now a known human carcinogen that the EPA recently banned, and convert it to nontoxic ethene.

    Dehalococcoides species “use chlorinated solvents as their electron acceptor, the same way that you and I use oxygen,” says David Freedman, an environmental engineering professor at Clemson University. “We now understand there are dechlorinating bacteria that breathe hundreds of different types of chlorinated organics,” he says, including chlorinated methanes and polychlorinated biphenyls. Dehalococcoides cultures are now commercially available for bioremediation projects that need to break down toxic chlorinated ethenes.

    Unlike organic pollutants, heavy metals can’t be fully degraded, but they can be isolated and even transformed into less toxic versions.

    Certain microbes get rid of toxic metals by using proteins to pump out unwanted materials, “so if the metal ends up inside the cellular membrane of the microbes, they have the capacity to pump it back out” Hénaff says.

    Other microbes immobilize the metals by absorbing them into bacterial cell surfaces or binding them inside cell walls with proteins. Microbes that hyperaccumulate heavy metals could one day be used to capture precious metals like lithium from the environment for reuse. “What’s considered a contaminant in this environment is a resource in other environments,” Hénaff says.

    Microbes can also manipulate the oxidation state of metals to convert them into insoluble, immobile, and nontoxic states. “Oxidation states mean everything with respect to the mobility and toxicity of heavy metals,” Freedman says.

    For example, iron-reducing microbes like Geobacter metallireducens can convert hexavalent chromium, a carcinogenic industrial compound shown to cause lung cancer, into insoluble, nontoxic trivalent chromium. Other microbial species dump waste electrons onto pentavalent arsenic, reducing it to soluble and more toxic trivalent arsenic. Giddings identified certain microbial genes in the Ely Brook that reduce sulfates into sulfides.

    Microbes tasked with cleanup

    Several strategies exist for cleaning up contaminated Superfund sites, but Freedman says bioremediation is a favored approach for several reasons. One in particular stands out: “If you can accomplish remediation using biology, it’s going to be cheaper than using physical or chemical processes,” he says.

    Ideally, remediation experts could just monitor how native microbial communities are dealing with pollutants on their own, but microbes can be slow, especially if their environment isn’t set up to maximize pollution degradation. So that’s when they step in to help.

    Remediation specialists can encourage microbes to move faster by pumping in nutrients to create the ideal conditions for cleanup. At the East Tennessee Technology Park, Roger Petrie and Sam Scheffler from the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management are focused on doing just that.

    Part of the Oak Ridge Reservation Superfund site, the park was once home to enriched uranium production for the Manhattan Project and the commercial nuclear power industry before its closure in 1987. During its operation, the facility “used TCE as a degreaser and solvent,” Scheffler says. Now it’s the main contaminant of concern for groundwater remediation at the site.

    Petrie and Scheffler’s goal is to reduce contaminant levels of TCE and related products in the most-polluted plumes on the site, which vary from 9 to 30 m in diameter. They hope to introduce a mixture of microbe-supporting components into the contaminated plumes via injection wells to help boost microbial productivity of TCE-chomping Dehalococcoides bacteria that live there.

    The composition of the mixtures will depend on the geochemical characteristics of each plume, but they will all include some mix of emulsified vegetable oil, a microbial food source. Scheffler says the mix may also include a pH buffer, “since we know that Dehalococcoides runs the dechlorination mechanism at 6 to 8 pH,” zero-valent iron “to enhance anaerobic conditions,” and possibly even extra Dehalococcoides cultures to increase the rate of the remediation.

    The team is still in the early phases of the project, and it is unclear how successful it will be. “We’re relying on living organisms to do the work for us,” Petrie says. “We do the best we can as far as identifying what would be ideal conditions for the microbes, but that information could still be flawed.”

    The untapped potential of microbes

    Giddings says it’s a long road from her lab’s work—sampling sites and identifying the microbes—to downstream work by others that can lead to bioremediation applications. After genetic analysis comes the difficult task of growing microbes in the lab to study their function further, and recreating the extreme conditions extremophiles grow in within the confines of a pristine lab is nearly impossible. “Most microbes are unculturable,” Giddings says.

    Still, the untapped potential of microbes in toxic environments makes them impossible to ignore, she says. Giddings hopes to find possible bioactive natural products or biocatalysts in the Vermont mine microbiome.

    In New York City, Hénaff is similarly investigating how to use genes isolated from the Gowanus Canal to develop affordable biosensors to detect heavy metal contamination in sediment.

    Hénaff says we have a lot to learn from microbes about what it means to live on a damaged planet. “We’ve never not lived in a microbial world,” she says. “I think they’re the ones who are going to get us through the rapid changes our planet is experiencing.”

    Continue Reading

  • IND vs ENG: ‘Earlier Kuldeep Yadav was kept out because of Ashwin’ – Mohammad Kaif warns Team India ahead of 2nd Test | Cricket News

    IND vs ENG: ‘Earlier Kuldeep Yadav was kept out because of Ashwin’ – Mohammad Kaif warns Team India ahead of 2nd Test | Cricket News

    Kuldeep Yadav (Photo by Gareth Copley/Getty Images)

    As India get ready for the second Test against England at Edgbaston, the focus has shifted sharply to team selection — particularly the exclusion of Kuldeep Yadav. Former cricketer Mohammad Kaif has stirred the debate by calling out what he believes is an ongoing oversight of the wrist-spinner.

    Team India All Smiles at Edgbaston Nets | Gill, Pant, Kuldeep Lead the Vibes

    Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!“It will be unfair if Kuldeep Yadav doesn’t get into the playing XI for the second Test. He has just played 13 Tests in 8 years. Earlier he was kept out because of Ashwin — now how do you justify his exclusion?” Kaif posted on X. Kaif’s remarks have added weight to an already tough decision for the team management. After a disappointing loss in Leeds, India’s strategy of prioritising batting depth over attacking bowling options is under scrutiny. With Jasprit Bumrah potentially sitting out due to workload management, India will be under pressure to find bowlers who can take 20 wickets, a challenge that proved too great in the series opener. The pitch at Edgbaston promises to offer help to spinners later in the match. While Ravindra Jadeja is a certainty, India must now decide whether to go with more batting-friendly option in Washington Sundar or finally unleash Kuldeep, whose variations could trouble England’s aggressive lineup. Meanwhile, the team is also looking to tweak its all-rounder and pace combinations. Shardul Thakur might make way for Nitish Reddy, and Akash Deep could partner Mohammed Siraj in Bumrah’s absence. With England sharpening their “Bazball” approach, India must respond with courage — and picking Kuldeep Yadav could be that bold, match-turning move.


    Continue Reading

  • Ivysaur Wearing a Party Hat Debuts in Pokémon GO’s Ninth Anniversary Event

    Ivysaur Wearing a Party Hat Debuts in Pokémon GO’s Ninth Anniversary Event

    Pokémon GO is celebrating its anniversary, and you’re invited to the 9th Anniversary Party from July 1 at 10:00 a.m. to July 6, 2025, at 8:00 p.m. local time! New costumed Pokémon debut, and there will be unique bonuses each day of the event. Ivysaur and Venusaur came dressed to the nines with party hats. Trainers might also find Gimmighoul holding a 9th anniversary coin—if they’re lucky, they may even encounter a Shiny one! Trainers might also find 9, 99, or even more Gimmighoul Coins when they spin a PokéStop with a Golden Lure Module.

    The fun doesn’t stop there. Event bonuses include an increased chance to become Lucky Friends, an increased chance to get Lucky Pokémon in trades, and friendship levels increasing faster than usual. PokéStops may turn gold without a Golden Lure Module, and Trainers will have an increased chance of encountering Shiny Pikachu wearing a cake hat and Shiny Eevee wearing a party hat from raids.

    The party keeps going—check out these event bonuses for certain days of the event.

    • July 1 at 10:00 a.m. to July 3, 2025, at 10:00 a.m. local time: 1/2 Egg Hatch Distance

    • July 3 at 10:00 a.m. to July 5, 2025, at 10:00 a.m. local time: 2× XP for catching Pokémon

    • July 5 at 10:00 a.m. to July 6, 2025, at 10:00 a.m. local time: 2× Stardust for catching Pokémon

    The following Pokémon will be partying—er, appearing—more frequently in the wild.

    • Bulbasaur wearing a party hat

    • Charmander wearing a party hat

    • Squirtle wearing a party hat

    If you’re lucky, you may even encounter a Shiny one!

    The following Pokémon will appear in one-star raids, and they might just be Shiny.

    Event-themed Field Research tasks will be available throughout the entire event period, so don your party hats and get ready to research! Completing Field Research tasks can earn you items and encounters with event-themed Pokémon—including Gimmighoul holding a 9th anniversary coin.

    Both free and paid Timed Research opportunities will be available. Free Timed Research rewards include XP, Stardust, and encounters with event-themed Pokémon, including Bulbasaur wearing a party hat, Wobbuffet wearing a party hat, Gimmighoul holding a 9th anniversary coin, and more!

    Paid Timed Research is available for US$1.99 (or the equivalent pricing tier in your local currency), and rewards include a Super Incubator, a Max Mushroom, an encounter with Gimmighoul holding a 9th anniversary coin, and more! The rewards for Timed Research expire, so be sure you complete the tasks and claim your rewards before Sunday, July 6, 2025, at 8:00 p.m. local time.

    If you want a party favor for a friend, you can purchase and gift tickets to any of your Pokémon GO friends that you’re Great Friends or higher with.

    For US$4.99 (or the equivalent pricing tier in your local currency), you can pick up a Masterwork Research story, Wish Granted, which leads to an encounter with Shiny Jirachi. Ticket holders who open Pokémon GO at any point during the ninth anniversary event will gain access to the Masterwork Research story, which they can then complete at any time.

    If you have already obtained the Masterwork Research story Wish Granted, you will not be able to purchase it again. However, Trainers who purchase this Masterwork Research story or have previously received the Masterwork Research: Wish Granted can enjoy the following bonuses for the duration of the event.

    Here’s to another great year, Trainers!

    Continue Reading

  • First space images from world’s largest digital camera | Northwest & National News

    First space images from world’s largest digital camera | Northwest & National News



























    First space images from world’s largest digital camera | Northwest & National News | nbcrightnow.com


    We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which
    enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time.

    For any issues, contact news@kndu.com or call 509-737-6725.

    Continue Reading

  • Jailed PTI leaders urge national dialogue to end crises

    Jailed PTI leaders urge national dialogue to end crises



    Pakistan


    Call for inclusive negotiations and access to party founder gains momentum from behind the bars



    Follow on

    Follow us on Google News


    LAHORE (Dunya News) – Senior leaders of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), currently incarcerated in Lahore jail, have issued a formal appeal urging the initiation of comprehensive negotiations to steer the country out of its worsening political and economic crisis.

    In a joint statement released from jail on Tuesday, the PTI leaders emphasised that dialogue is the only viable path toward stability. “Negotiations must take place at all levels,” the statement read, adding that both political actors and state institutions need to engage constructively.

    The statement further proposed that political negotiations be prioritised as an entry point to broader talks, with incarcerated PTI leaders included in the process. It also called for improved access to PTI’s founding chairman to facilitate the formation of a negotiation committee.

    Also read: Aleema Khan claims 26th Amendment being used to sideline PTI founder

    The appeal was signed by prominent PTI figures including Shah Mahmood Qureshi, Dr Yasmin Rashid, Umar Sarfraz Cheema, Mian Mehmood-ur-Rasheed, and Ijaz Ahmad Chaudhry.

    ‘ ;
    var i = Math.floor(r_text.length * Math.random());
    document.write(r_text[i]);

    Continue Reading

  • NASA Assigns Astronaut Anil Menon to First Space Station Mission

    NASA Assigns Astronaut Anil Menon to First Space Station Mission

    NASA astronaut Anil Menon will embark on his first mission to the International Space Station, serving as a flight engineer and Expedition 75 crew member.

    Menon will launch aboard the Roscosmos Soyuz MS-29 spacecraft in June 2026, accompanied by Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina. After launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the trio will spend approximately eight months aboard the orbiting laboratory.

    During his expedition, Menon will conduct scientific investigations and technology demonstrations to help prepare humans for future space missions and benefit humanity.

    Selected as a NASA astronaut in 2021, Menon graduated with the 23rd astronaut class in 2024. After completing initial astronaut candidate training, he began preparing for his first space station flight assignment.

    Menon was born and raised in Minneapolis and is an emergency medicine physician, mechanical engineer, and colonel in the United States Space Force. He holds a bachelor’s degree in neurobiology from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, and a medical degree from Stanford University in California. Menon completed his emergency medicine and aerospace medicine residency at Stanford and the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

    In his spare time, he still practices emergency medicine at Memorial Hermann’s Texas Medical Center and teaches residents at the University of Texas’ residency program. Menon served as SpaceX’s first flight surgeon, helping to launch the first crewed Dragon spacecraft on NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 mission and building SpaceX’s medical organization to support humans on future missions. He served as a crew flight surgeon for both SpaceX flights and NASA expeditions aboard the space station.

    For nearly 25 years, people have lived and worked continuously aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge and conducting critical research for the benefit of humanity and our home planet. Space station research supports the future of human spaceflight as NASA looks toward deep space missions to the Moon under the Artemis campaign and in preparation for future human missions to Mars, as well as expanding commercial opportunities in low Earth orbit and beyond. 

    Learn more about International Space Station at:

    https://www.nasa.gov/station

    -end-

    Joshua Finch / Jimi Russell
    Headquarters, Washington
    202-358-1100
    joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov / james.j.russell@nasa.gov

    Shaneequa Vereen
    Johnson Space Center, Houston
    281-483-5111
    shaneequa.y.vereen@nasa.gov   

    Continue Reading

  • Games promote preparedness and build community resilience to wildfire

    Games promote preparedness and build community resilience to wildfire

    If a wildfire causes an evacuation, people are forced to leave quickly and make decisions under pressure about what to bring and what to leave behind. Households with multiple cars might want to pack into more than one vehicle to save more possessions, but doing so risks causing traffic that can block firefighter access and endanger people, especially in neighborhoods with few exits and narrow roads. 

    These challenging decisions can have serious impacts on the outcome of a fire, and are what players confront in ‘Firewise Residents,’ one of three simulation games created by University of California, Santa Cruz computational media researchers to build preparedness for a wildfire scenario. 

    An increasingly present local issue, several Baskin School of Engineering faculty have turned their expertise in serious game design toward the issue of wildfires. The labs of Professors of Computational Media Katherine Isbister, Magy Seif El-Nasr, and Sri Kurniawan, along with Visiting Professor Eddie Melcer, are using game design to help communities build resilience to wildfire. Kurniawan’s lab explores VR approaches evacuation preparation. 

    These games can help people think about stressful topics, initiating individual preparedness and larger dialogue. As the games reach more people, researchers hope to spark community-level change, as climate change fuels more frequent and severe wildfires locally and globally.

    “We’re using game design techniques to have conversations with the communities that are grappling with these problems,” said MJ Johns, a Ph.D. student in the Social Emotional Technology Lab who is leading the game design. “They’ve been dealing with the issue of wildfire for a long time, but I think that giving them that frame of designing and playing a game about their experience helps open them up to have more productive dialogue.”

    In ‘Firewise Residents,” players think through how individual decisions affect their community.

    Connected communities

    Isbister’s research has long focused on interactive gaming experiences that heighten social and emotional connections and wellbeing. With the increasing urgency of the climate crisis, she wanted to apply her expertise to affect change. 

    This motivated her connection to the “Smart and Connected Communities” project led by Kenichi Soga, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley. The NSF-funded effort brings together scholars along with community members, emergency 

    personnel, and civic leaders to develop innovative ways to manage risk from wildfires, from serious games to digital twin models of communities to simulate crises. 

    Researchers from UC Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and Davis are working with communities in Alameda, Marin, and Santa Cruz counties. Workshops and interviews with utility workers, emergency responders, and local firewise councils revealed key community concerns.

    “There were ideas coming out of those conversations that I think we wouldn’t get if we weren’t trying to engage them in the game design process,” Johns said. “We’re asking them to think of themselves as a game designer, and help us create games about the experience that they’ve had. It really opens up the dialogue with those communities and gets them very invested in iterative design.”

    Over the past two years, the games have been iterated with input from Alameda and Marin communities, natural hazard and serious games experts, and communities in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties, including Highland Firewise council near UC Santa Cruz.

    “All these layers of co-design and participation over the past two years that has allowed us to very rapidly iterate and develop full playable games that have a lot of different perspectives and insights embedded in the design,” Johns said. 

    Mobile games

    Now, there are three mobile mini games that are now available online: Firewise Residents, FireSafe Friends, and Find Your Things. Each deals with complex dilemmas that ask people to make hard decisions, as a recent paper reports. 

    In Firewise Residents, players talk with townspeople, from children to elders, about evacuation challenges. In Find Your Things, they pack a go-bag for an evacuation. FireSafe Friends, a two-player game, has players choose materials and landscaping to “harden” homes, then test them in a simulated burn. The graphics draw on fire-simulation models developed by civil engineers and fire scientists at UC Berkeley, turning the tools meant for experts into a resource for the larger community. 

    “We’re taking ideas from those simulation tools and putting them in a gameplay context where the general public can interact with it,” Johns said. 

    The games provide a safe environment to think through challenging, complex topics that people might otherwise avoid, sparking more engagement than traditional fire safety presentations. The design draws inspiration from cute, classic games such as Animal Crossing and Eco, providing a comforting environment that builds connection to the characters.

    “Game simulations can give you a little flavor of the emotional texture of that experience and make it feel more real,” Isbister said. “You also have agency to make choices and see the outcome of your choices.”

    Measuring impact

    The team hopes the game will reach communities in California and beyond, recruiting fire marshals and citizen firewise councils to facilitate running the games. They also envision the games as a lesson in middle and high school classrooms, so that students, a particularly at-risk group in a disaster, can start conversations at home.

    Assessing the actual impact of the games is crucial, which is where Seif El-Nasr’s lab is taking the lead. 

    Serious games are typically evaluated at the individual level: did they change attitudes or teach something? But these researchers are looking at community impact: who’s playing, whether it sparks further learning, and if behavior changes. They’re applying a discourse analysis framework to study co-learning—how players talk, reason, and make decisions together. By analyzing real-time conversations between paired players, the research offers deeper insight into how collaborative reasoning and reflection can support real-world preparedness.

    “We’re trying to understand if these games can be used as an instrument to foster collaborative learning among community residents,” said Mario Escarce Junior, a postdoc in Seif El-Nasr’s lab. “We have a specific framework in which we’re trying to understand if we can observe learning through conversations while players are playing in pairs and discussing their strategies.” 

    “It’s not just that participants are learning from each other and discovering knowledge together: it’s also planning, goals, role composition—these meta-cognitive skills are important for working together and learning,” Seif El-Nasr added. “Wildfire is a community issue; it’s not just about one house being hardened, there’s a whole community working together. There are a lot of aspects around collective action and collective resilience in a whole community – developing measures to assess and investigate these is essential.”

    The researchers are also interested in evaluating the games’ performance in other countries and cultures, with Escarce Junior testing Firesafe friends in his home country of Brazil. 

    The researchers envision that lessons drawn from this work could inform other climate resilience efforts beyond wildfire. For example, drawing on lessons learned from these efforts, Seif El-Nasr’s Ph.D. student Mennatullah Hendawy is leading the development of various alternate reality games related to sea-level rise. In the future, the researchers hope to build more games to address resilience in the aftermath of a disaster, like the rebuilding efforts currently underway in the wake of disastrous fires.

    Leveraging VR

    When the CZU fires devastated parts of Santa Cruz county, Kurniawan, along with her Ph.D. student Allison Crosby, who was affected by the 2018 Paradise fire, became interested in using technology to educate on wildfire-evacuation preparedness. Kurniawan has deep experience in developing assistive-technology games, often making use of virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR).

    With funding through CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, a UC-wide research center, her lab is developing a timed virtual reality game on preparing a go-bag for a wildfire evacuation while managing the capacity of their car. 

    To inform their design, Crosy interviewed people who experienced the local CZU fire, including survivors of the local Bonny Doon fire who had to evacuate their homes at 3 a.m., people who evacuated from the UC Santa Cruz campus, and voluntary evacuees from the surrounding area. The stories they heard directly influenced the narrative of the game.

    “Some of the stories were really sad, they lost their homes or they lost their pets,” Kurniawan said. “The scenarios inside those games were informed by those interviews, literally front and center are pets. The theme that came up was making decisions under pressure.”

    Players pack for an evacuation under time pressure in an immersive VR game developed in Kurniawan’s lab.

    Mobile vs. VR

    Kurniawan and Crosby are measuring the game qualitatively, aiming for people to feel more confident and comfortable for an emergency situation, and often hear reports that the game prompts people to consider what they’d pack in an evacuation for the first time.

    Realizing they were both developing wildfire go-bag games, Crosby and Johns ran a study comparing the mobile and VR versions. 

    They found that people had similar behavior changes and learning outcomes, although they found the VR game more exciting. So, researchers could pick the version most suitable for a specific audience—VR is not always ideal for children, older adults, or people who get motion sick with VR, and many people may not have access to VR headsets. The researchers are also experimenting with using smoke odors in the VR game to boost engagement and memory retention.

    Kurniawan is working with the UC Santa Cruz fire marshall to explore integrating their VR game into the wildfire training that undergraduates on campus are given. 

    “Everything we have built would be good for the UC Santa Cruz fire marshall to use to attract the attention of younger people,” Kurniawan said. “If we have resources available to us, I would love to get more headsets, install the games, and just distribute them freely in the public library or on campus to get people to try them and trigger conversation.”

    Related Topics

    Climate & Sustainability, Technology

    Continue Reading

  • Amazon unveils its Prime Gaming freebies for July 2025

    Amazon unveils its Prime Gaming freebies for July 2025

    Amazon announced a fresh batch of games that it’s giving away for free or nearly free in July. The company’s cloud gaming platform, Amazon Luna, has a few notable standouts on its lineup of free titles this month for Prime members in regions where the service is available. However, you’ll want to play quick. Resident Evil 2 is available on Amazon Luna now through 11:59PM PT on July 12. Need for Speed Unbound is only free for July 5-6, while EA Sports FC 25 is getting two free weekends on July 19-20 and July 26-27. The director’s cut of Death Stranding and the excellent metroidvania Hollow Knight are also on the July roster for Luna, alongside mainstay titles such as Fortnite, Rainbow Six Siege and a few Fallout games.

    Amazon also gives away game codes outside of Luna to Prime members each month. The big standout in the July batch is Venba, a lovely bite-sized game about cooking, family and the immigrant experience. Here’s the full rundown of free games available through Amazon this month:

    • Boxes: Lost Fragments (Epic Games Store)

    • Paquerette Down the Bunburrows (Epic Games Store)

    • ENDLESS Space 2 Definitive Edition (Amazon Games App)

    • Besiege: The Splintered Sea DLC (Amazon Games App)

    • I Love Finding Wild Friends Collector’s Edition (Legacy Games)

    July is shaping up to be a busy month for gaming at Amazon, with the retailer’s kicking off in about a week. Amazon has already made a handful of available for free ahead of the big deals spree, and if it continues the trend from last year, expect to see a couple more freebies given out once Prime Day begins.

    Continue Reading

  • Chicago Stars FC Announces Coaching Staff Updates

    Chicago Stars FC Announces Coaching Staff Updates

    Chicago Stars FC today announced that interim head coach, Masaki Hemmi, will be departing the club to pursue other opportunities, effective July 3. Assistant coach, Ella Masar, will serve as interim head coach while the Chicago Stars secure a new head coach.

    “I’m incredibly grateful for my time with the Chicago Stars and the opportunity to work alongside such talented players and staff,” said Masaki Hemmi. “While it’s bittersweet to be leaving, the club has a bright future ahead. I’ll forever be thankful for the time I had with Chicago Stars FC.”

    “We thank Masaki Hemmi for stepping up as interim head coach and working tirelessly to bring out the best in our players,” said Chicago Stars general manager, Richard Feuz. “While we are grateful for his time and dedication to the club, we fully support him taking the next step in his coaching career. We wish him much success as he pursues this exciting opportunity.”

    Chicago Stars FC has been carrying out an extensive head coach search since parting ways with Lorne Donaldson in May.

    “We are well underway in our thorough head coaching search,” said Chicago Stars FC president, Karen Leetzow. “We have narrowed down the candidate pool and expect to appoint a new head coach soon. While we have a lot of building ahead, we look forward to turning the page to the second half of our season and starting a new chapter for the team.”

    Hemmi joined the club in 2024 as first assistant coach, helping lead the Chicago Stars’ return to the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) playoffs after the club finished at the bottom of the NWSL table in 2023. After a 1-5-0 start to the 2025 NWSL regular season landing the Chicago Stars back at the bottom of the table, Hemmi stepped in as interim head coach April 30. Under Hemmi, the Stars maintained a 0-4-3 record, improving to 13th place in the table with a 1-9-3 overall record heading into the NWSL midseason break. Prior to becoming the first Japanese head coach in the NWSL, acting or otherwise, Hemmi served as director of player personnel and first assistant coach at United Soccer League club, New Mexico United, from 2022-2023. Hemmi also spent time as an associate head coach preparing players for the Tokyo Olympics at Japanese side, INAC Kobe of the WE League, in 2021.

    A former Chicago Star herself, Ella Masar begins her second stint as interim head coach for the club, previously serving as acting head coach at the end of the 2023 season. Masar will continue working closely with assistant coaches, Karina Báez and Brenton Saylor, as the trio remains focused on leadership and stability prior to a permanent head coach being named. Masar has spent more than two decades in professional soccer as a player and coach, joining the Chicago Stars as an assistant coach in January 2023. Most recently, Masar was selected to join the United States Women’s National Team coaching staff for the April international window.

    The Chicago Stars would like to thank Masaki Hemmi for devotion to the club and the players throughout his time as both assistant and interim head coach, and wish him all best in his future endeavors.

    Continue Reading

  • Trading on protection against UK defaults jumped in Q1, says ISDA

    Trading on protection against UK defaults jumped in Q1, says ISDA

    By Nell Mackenzie

    LONDON (Reuters) -Trading of derivatives contracts that provide investors with protection against UK company defaults jumped almost 50% in the first quarter of 2025 to more than $2 trillion, an International Swaps and Derivatives Association report showed on Tuesday.

    WHY IT’S IMPORTANT

    Credit default swaps trading reported in the UK rose by 47% to $2.3 trillion, from $1.5 trillion in the first quarter of 2024, trade body ISDA reported.

    The volume of insurance protection investors took out on UK corporate bonds in the first quarter illustrates the scale of unease ahead of U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement of sweeping import tariffs on April 2.

    While a UK/U.S. trade deal has since been signed, tariff uncertainty is a headwind for corporates globally as a July 9 U.S. deadline for other countries to strike deals looms.

    The effective U.S. tariff rate based on announced policies has climbed to 13% from 3% at the start of the year, Goldman Sachs analysts said last week.

    Even if some of the harshest levies are rolled back, higher effective tariffs this year could still drive up inflation and cut into company profits and consumer spending.

    KEY QUOTE

    “Single-name CDS activity was particularly prevalent in the UK, making up 98% of European traded notional, compared to 2% in the EU,” the ISDA report said.

    This week, trade tensions topped a list of investor concerns alongside deepening worries over a potential global recession, a Bank of America investor survey showed on Monday.

    BY THE NUMBERS

    Notional European CDS trading rose 28% to $3 trillion in the first quarter compared to $2.3 trillion in the first quarter of 2024, driven by heightened activity in index CDS, ISDA said.

    UK-reported trades represented roughly 75% of total European CDS notional trading, and almost 82% of the total trade count, while the EU accounted for around 25% and 18%, respectively, the report said.

    GRAPHIC

    (Reporting by Nell Mackenzie. Editing by Dhara Ranasinghe and Mark Potter)

    Continue Reading