Golden jackals are often seen as a pest, blamed for the death of livestock and wild animals as they move from south-central Eurasia into northern Europe. But they are in fact saving countries millions of euros in waste management services.

“We want to change people’s opinions about jackals,” says at the University of Belgrade, Serbia. “They are blamed for hunting wild and domestic animals, but we found that they are only eating the carcasses and remains left by people.”

Ćirović and his colleagues analysed the stomach contents of 606 golden jackals (Canis aureus) in different areas of Serbia that had been shot or killed on roads.

They found that most of the jackals’ diet was made up of the skin or intestines of domestic animals, such as pigs, or wild animals, like roe deer or wild boar, that are usually discarded by hunters or after the animals are slaughtered. They also ate small rodents that are often considered to be crop pests.

Considering the jackal population in Serbia, the researchers estimate that every year they remove 3700 tonnes of discarded animal remains and 13.2 million crop pest rodents, a service that would cost half a million euros a year.

Super savings

Based on the estimated jackal population in the whole of Europe, the figures could be as high as 13,000 tonnes of animal remains and 158 million rodents, they claim.

Medium-sized carnivores, like coyotes, foxes, badgers and jackals, usually thrive in urban areas, but are rarely appreciated for their ecological role or the ecosystem services they provide, the researchers say.
“They are particularly important in areas where there are no more apex predators – lions, bears, crocodiles – or obligate scavengers, like vultures,” says James Beasley at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, University of Georgia. “They provide a valuable ecosystem service by removing dead animal material and potentially limiting disease transmission.”

However, he points out that they are also predators and a reservoir of diseases, including rabies. So the benefits of their presence could be outweighed if their population becomes too large.

Journal reference: Biological Conservation, DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2016.04.027

Read more: The case of the lookalike jackals: How can three virtually identical species of jackal share the same habitat?

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Last month, Pag and his chemistry-teacher partner Esther Obiri-Darko led a team that drove across Europe on kebab-shop leftovers, which they converted into clean, efficient vegetable oil using a simple filtration system. Their fuel may have been off-beat, but the message is not: finding renewable sources of energy is both necessary and possible. And for chemists, this equates to one thing: a flood of great career opportunities.

“When I started my degree I could never have predicted that energy materials – the area I work in – would become so important,” says Peter Bruce, professor of chemistry at the University of St Andrews. Energy research is breathing life into chemistry, providing welcome relief from the shortage of funding and departmental closures of the recent past. “It’s creating more diverse opportunities for chemists,” agrees Jeff Hardy, network manager at the UK Energy Research Centre in London.

Applying core chemical skills to other disciplines can open numerous avenues for scientists who are willing to adapt. “The old traditional chemical industries are not the powerhouses for employment that they were 30 years ago,” says Bruce, but “eco” concerns are providing alternative career opportunities for chemists.

Could our energy problems be chemistry’s saviour? żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ finds out what’s on offer. While some kinds of chemistry are more in vogue than others, green chemistry is one area that won’t be going out of fashion any time soon. By rethinking chemical processes from the ground up, green chemists are providing practical solutions that need less energy, use cheaper raw materials and produce less waste, as well as reducing our dependence on fossil fuels.

“Green chemistry is becoming popular by necessity,” says Hardy. The need for companies to improve their green credentials is fuelling its growth. In fact, most of today’s research has some component of green chemistry, says Bruce: “It’s very much on people’s minds.”

Green chemistry often uses technologies that are too new for most university courses to cover. That’s not necessarily a problem, as an overall awareness of the environment is much more important than specific skills, Hardy says. “You can always be taught the techniques later.” If you’re interested in getting a head start, though, York and Nottingham universities offer specialist courses in green chemistry.

If industry appeals, then Hardy advises that you learn to develop partnerships with as many people as possible. “Talk to engineers, biologists – whoever can give you a different approach to typical problems. Chemistry is not a discipline that has been traditionally comfortable with having that contact. So anything that shows you’ve broken through some traditional boundaries will be good in your CV.”

And don’t underestimate the significance of the work you choose to do; small steps can make a huge difference. In 1993, researchers at the Merseyside-based speciality chemicals company Uniqema developed emkarate, a lubricant for fridge compressors that increased their efficiency by about 20 per cent. “This simple bit of chemistry has saved a large amount of greenhouse gases from being released, and is being used in 500 million refrigerators worldwide,” says Hardy.

Our hunger for clean energy provides a big challenge for the next generation of chemists. “New fuel sources are clearly a high priority for both the government and industry in the private sector,” says Libby Steele, education manager for universities at the Royal Society of Chemistry. But it’s an uphill battle for scientists as they compete to find a cheap and efficient alternative that meets our current energy demands.

The key is to work on several different technologies simultaneously, says Bruce. “Too often in the western world they try to look into a crystal ball and predict what will succeed 10 or 20 years down the line. That’s not what nations like Japan have done. They have developed many different ideas right to the prototype level, and then evaluated what would succeed and what would fail.”

Generating clean energy is only part of the problem; chemists will be needed to help store it so that it is always available when needed. “If we are going to use wind, wave or solar energy, we need ways of storing this electricity because they are intermittent in supply,” says Bruce. “As we reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, we will rely on the storage of electricity far more than ever before.”

At the heart of this storage is battery technology, and for this chemistry is key. “There is much to be done in the research and development fields,” says Hardy.

It seems that each challenge represents another opportunity. Hydrogen technology, in particular, has spawned a growing industry that provides a lot of work for chemists, says Nick Hart, a researcher at ITM Power in Sheffield. “With the rising prices of oil there’s a lot of government support for renewable energy.” About 60 per cent of the people working in basic research at ITM are chemists, Hart says.

Hardy agrees that hydrogen could be the next big thing. “It’s attractive because it has high energy density. It offers a good bang for your buck.”

After decades out of favour, nuclear power is again rising up the agenda – so much so that there is now a shortage of chemists with nuclear experience. This is providing great opportunities for skilled young people to take the fast track to senior positions. “There are quite a few reports out showing that the number of chemists available for recruitment into the nuclear industry is just not enough,” says Steele.

While chemists don’t play a major role in the building of a nuclear reactor, they are vital to monitoring functions and treatment of nuclear waste, says project manager Claire Gallery-Strong at Sellafield Ltd, which is managing the decommissioning and clean-up of two of the UK’s major nuclear sites. “There are several issues that have yet to be resolved in this area, meaning opportunities for chemists,” she says.

Hardy highlights the growing number of opportunities for dealing with nuclear waste. “In the UK we have a legacy of nuclear waste going back to the early 1940s. Now we are debating how and where to bury this waste.” With £73 billion set aside to tackle the problem, there are likely to be plenty of jobs to go around, he says. “There’s a lot of work for chemists in analysing, developing treatment methods, researching storage media and also understanding the long-term behaviour of nuclear waste, particularly its interaction with organic and inorganic materials.”

Whether you’re in a well-placed industry or heading for a high-flying academic career, successful chemists need to be able to work with specialists from other disciplines. Such links provide access to experienced personnel and top-flight expertise. The ability to appreciate how other subjects work and how they interact with your own research is vital, says William Jones, head of chemistry at the University of Cambridge. “Chemists are ubiquitous: they pop up everywhere, working in a hugely diverse range of fields, from teaching and research to patent offices and laboratories,” agrees Steele (see “An alternative career”)

“They should think of themselves as part of a bigger discipline working to solve a problem, rather than focusing exclusively on their own subject,” says Jones. “It’s important to remain open-minded. It’s all too easy to only focus on work that is immediately relevant to your day-to-day issues. But it’s essential to know what’s going on in other areas. Many of the great breakthroughs come from people who have moved from one area of research to another.”

Still, a hint of stubbornness might just help you on your way, at least in academia. “To succeed you need stamina, perseverance, determination and single-mindedness,” says Guy Lloyd-Jones, co-director of the Centre for Organometallic Catalysis at the University of Bristol. “You have to learn not to be discouraged by failure when you don’t get funding.” Though chemistry has seen some thin times lately, he believes that in the long term it has “a healthy and positive future”.

As the world becomes increasingly reliant on alternative forms of energy, the opportunities for chemists become ever more attractive. But a word of caution: with so many opportunities available, it pays to choose your career path with special care. “Be flexible and be aware of where the important challenges are, but do things that interest and excite you,” says Bruce. “If you do good science, you will define the areas that will become important, rather than chase them.”

Pollen and grit are the components of a new coating for gun cartridges that UK researchers hope will help to identify criminals that use firearms.

Under their scheme, batches of cartridges would be labelled with unique “nanotags”, invisible to naked eye, designed to attach themselves to hands, gloves and clothing of anyone that handles a cartridge. Some of the tags would remain on the spent cartridge casing.

The tags could perform a similar, but more authoritative role to the specks of unintended explosives residue sometimes used to tie people to guns or crimes.

The nanotags are made from pollen, and a mix of grains of crystal oxides such as zirconia, silica and titanium oxide. Using varying combinations of crystal and pollen grains, it is possible to make large numbers of unique tags.

“We decided to work with pollens because they have a unique structure, resistant to temperature and easily recognisable,” said from the University of Surrey, who has led the research. “It’s also easily dispersed and carried around in clothes, skin, etc.”

DNA trap

Pollen grains (see image, right) vary between plant species and are easily identified under a microscope. Chemical techniques could reveal which oxides were mixed with the pollen, and in which proportions to work out which batch of cartridges they originate from.

“The most challenging part of the project was nanoengineering a coating robust enough to withstand the [high temperatures of] firing and that would still release the tags when touched,” he added.

Sermon says that the tags are designed to be compatible with current cartridge manufacturing processes and could be implemented within 12 months of companies or government supporting their introduction.

In addition to the tags, the researchers are working on a way to have gun cartridges retain skin cells from anyone that handle them, for later DNA-based forensic analysis. Micro-scale grit can effectively trap cells and protect DNA from the heat of firing. Today, cartridges are smooth and rarely retain DNA or fingerprints.

The team is also looking to apply that technique to knives so they retain DNA more reliably.

The tags were developed by researchers from Brighton, Brunel, Cranfield, Surrey and York Universities, with commercial collaborators including UK defence firm BAE Systems.

Forensic Science – Keep up with the pace in our continually updated .

Researchers at the , San Francisco, were motivated by the fact that, until now, models of the way brains respond to visual input used simple images like dots, bars and grids. They are typically unable to cope with the complex scenes a human would usually see.

To try and develop a more sophisticated model, the team recorded the responses of 49 individual neurons in a part of a cat’s brain called the (LGN). The LGN receives and processes visual information from the retina, via the optic nerve, before sending it on to the cerebral cortex.

Using a mixture of simple stimuli, like dots and bars, and building up to more complex moving artificial scenes, the team tried to work out the basics of the LGN’s response to visual features.

Call in the catcam

The data made it possible to build a software model of the LGN that can approximate how the neurons would respond to real scenes. The model was tested against scenes recorded from a “catcam” camera attached to a cat’s head.

“We chose the catcam because it was the most natural stimulus we could think of, the closest to what a cat would see when walking around,” Matteo Carandini told żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ. Because the catcam footage lacked elements moving independently from the rest of the scene, the researchers also used a scene from Disney’s animated film Tarzan.

The model’s predictions proved to be 80% accurate when shown artificial scenes, but this figure fell to 60% with the natural scenes or the Tarzan movie.

“This is still impressive, but shows a way to go,” says , a neuroscientist at Imperial College London, UK.

Predicting LGN activity from moving images at all is significant, he says. “[The researchers] recognise that the perceptual world is not a single frame at a time but a constant stream of data,” he told żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ.

Bionic eyes

The ultimate goal of the research, still years distant, is to develop an implant that uses visual data to directly stimulate the LGN of blind people whose optic nerve or retina has degenerated from lack of use.

“For these people, a prosthesis in the eye doesn’t help,” Carandini explains. Only people who have recently become blind can benefit from such implants – currently being tested in humans – that stimulate the retina or optic nerve,.

Work on monkeys last year showed it is possible to stimulate the LGN using electrodes to alter their vision, something previously thought impossible. Software models like that developed by Carandini and colleagues would be vital for an implant to stimulate the right neurons to create a mental impression of vision.

Journal reference: