“Our most important finding was an elite woman buried with a birchbark hat called a bogtog and silk robes depicting a golden five-clawed dragon,” Ventresca-Miller said in a university news release. “Our proteomic analyses concluded that she drank yak milk during her lifetime. This helped us verify the long-term use of this iconic animal in the region and its ties to elite rulers.”

The study was a collaboration between researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, the National Museum of Mongolia, Nomad Science and University of Zurich.

Other than salaries, the university did not spend money on the fieldwork portion of the study, Ventresca-Miller said. National Geographic, Noman Science and the Max Planck Institute mostly funded the excavations, she said, while the university also contributed.

A cost of the study was not made available.

Burnout by online community moderators

People moderating forums on Reddit burn out due to, among many things, constant exposure to toxic online behavior, said School of Information doctoral candidate Angela Schopke-Gonzalez.

Her study, found here, not only asks why volunteer content moderators quit, but how companies such as Meta or Reddit can prevent the burnout.

“VCMs experience many of the same psychological distress challenges as crisis hotline volunteer responders, caregivers and volunteer support providers for persons who have experienced violence,” Schöpke-Gonzalez said in a university news release. “Researchers, platforms and moderators can learn from work addressing psychological distress among similar volunteer groups to craft interventions that support VCMs.”

These moderators keep our information ecosystems alive, Schopke-Gonzalez said, so it is important to find ways to mitigate the risks of the job.

Schopke-Gonzalez is collaborating with associate professor of information Libby Hemphill, doctoral candidate Shubham Atreja and former research assistants Han Na Shin and Najmin Ahmed.

The study was funded by a $347,685 grant through the National Science Foundation.

Nepalese tigers walking into traffic

What does it take for tigers in Nepal to feel more comfortable walking on a national highway? A nationwide COVID-19 lockdown, according to a UM study.

Researchers found that during the COVID-19 lockdown in Nepal that “traffic reductions relaxed tiger avoidance of roads,” officials said. The tigers were two to three times more likely to cross the highway during the lockdown than before it, said lead author Neil Carter of the School for Environment and Sustainability.

“Our results provide clear evidence that vehicle traffic on major roads impedes tiger movements, but also that tigers can respond quickly to reductions in human pressures,” Carter said in a university news release. “The fact that both tigers immediately changed their behaviors is encouraging because it means that mitigating road impacts can lead to quick conservation benefits by enabling tigers to more freely roam their territories.”

The study was published in January in the Global Ecology and Conservation journal. The use of GPS technology to track the tigers is the first of its kind since the 1980s, university officials said.

The study was done due to roads posing challenges for the conservation of endangered species, researchers said, as there are less than 4,500 tigers left in the wild.

The university did not provide funding for the study, which came from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Rhinoceros and Tiger Conservation Fund. These grants were typically at least $50,000 each, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates.

Clothing recycling

Less than 15% of the 92 million tons of clothing discarded each year are recycled, university researchers found. A university study proposed a solution to change the fibers of clothing labels to better sort clothing and recycle them better.

University researchers could change woven-in labels to be made with less expensive photonic fibers that would act “like a barcode,” said professor of material science and engineering Max Shtein.

“We can customize the photonic properties of the fibers to make them visible to the naked eye, readable only under near-infrared light or any combination,” he said in a university news release.

One of the major issues with recycling clothing is sorting them properly when they are discarded, researchers said. Since ordinary tags are often gone by the time clothing is discarded, weaving the tags into the clothing could help sort them better, Shtein said.

Recyclers already use infrared sorting systems with discarded clothing, so the study’s conclusion would better focus these recycling efforts, said Brian Iezzi, a postdoctoral research in Shtein’s lab.

“For a truly circular recycling system to work, it’s important to know the precise composition of a fabric—a cotton recycler doesn’t want to pay for a garment that’s made of 70% polyester,” Iezzi said. “Natural optical signatures can’t provide that level of precision, but our photonic fibers can.”

Find the study here. The study has received $1,679,413 to this point from the National Science Foundation.

Black holes? Dark energy?

University researchers believe they have found a source of the universe’s dark energy, or the hypothetical form of energy proposed by physicists to explain why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.

The two studies, found in the Astrophysical Journal and Astrophysical Journal Letters, searched through nine billion years of data to find the first evidence of “cosmological coupling.” This refers to a phenomenon predicted in Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity where black holes are placed inside an evolving, expanding universe, university officials said.

Professor of physics Gregory Tarle, researchers from University of Hawaii and institutions across nine countries published the two studies. The first shows that the black holes Tarle and others found are not explained by known scientific processes, while the second shows the cosmological coupling encloses the energy that equates with the measured quantity of the dark energy that formed the known universe.

“We’re really saying two things at once: that there’s evidence the typical black hole solutions don’t work for you on a long, long timescale, and we have the first proposed astrophysical source for dark energy,” Duncan Farrah, University of Hawaii astronomer and lead author on both papers, said in a university news release.

“What that means, though, is not that other people haven’t proposed sources for dark energy, but this is the first observational paper where we’re not adding anything new to the universe as a source for dark energy: Black holes in Einstein’s theory of gravity are the dark energy,” Farrah added.

The study was started with an initial funding of $950,000 split between University of Hawaii and University of Michigan, Tarle said.