Tech and the science of dogs’ olfactory receptors combat avalanche threats
Two-and-a-half year-old Huckleberry, a blue merle Australian shepherd, pulls hard at her leash; her yelps can be heard by skiers and boarders high above on the chairlift that carries them over the ski patrol hut to the top of the mountain. Huckleberry is an avalanche rescue dog — or avy dog, for short. She lives and works with her owner and handler, a ski patroller at Breckenridge Ski Resort in Colorado. As she watches the trainer play a game of hide-and-seek with six-month-old Lume, a golden retriever and avy dog-in-training, Huckleberry continues to strain on her leash; she loves the game. Hide-and-seek is one of the key training methods for teaching avy dogs the rescue skills they need to find someone caught in an avalanche — skier, snowmobiler, hiker, climber.
Lume’s owner waves a T-shirt in front of the puppy. While another patroller holds him back, Lume’s owner runs away and hides. About a minute later — after a lot of barking — Lume is released and commanded to “search.” He springs free, running around the hut to find his owner who reacts with a great amount of excitement and fanfare. Lume’s scent training will continue for the rest of the ski season (Breckenridge plans operating through May or as long as weather permits) and through the off-season. “We make this game progressively harder by not allowing the dog watch the victim run away,” explains Dave Leffler, Breckenridge's ski patroller and head of the avy dog program, who has owned, trained and raised many of them. Eventually, the trainers “dig an open hole in the snow to duck out of sight and gradually turn the hole into a cave where the dog has to dig to get the victim,” explains Leffler.
By the time he is three, Lume, like Huckleberry, will be a fully trained avy pup and will join seven other avy dogs on Breckenridge ski patrol team. Some of the team members, both human and canine, are also certified to work with Colorado Rapid Avalanche Deployment, a coordinated response team that works with the Summit County Sheriff’s office for avalanche emergencies outside of the ski slopes’ boundaries.
There have been 19 avalanche deaths in the U.S. this season, according to avalanche.org, which tracks slides; eight in Colorado. During the entirety of last season there were 17. Avalanche season runs from November through June, but avalanches can occur year-round.
High tech and high stakes
Complementing avy dogs’ ability to smell people buried in a slide, avalanche detection, rescue and recovery is becoming increasingly high tech. There are transceivers, signal locators, ground scanners and drones, which are considered “games changers” by many in avalanche rescue and recovery
For a person buried in an avalanche, the chance of survival plummets after 20 minutes, so every moment counts.
A drone can provide thermal imaging of objects caught in a slide; what looks like a rock from far away might be a human with a heat signature. Transceivers, also known as beacons, send a signal from an avalanche victim to a companion. Signal locators, like RECCO reflectors which are often sewn directly into gear, can echo back a radar signal sent by a detector; most ski resorts have RECCO detector units.
Research suggests that Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), an electromagnetic tool used by geophysicists to pull images from inside the ground, could be used to locate an avalanche victim. A new study from the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories suggests that a computer program developed to pinpoint the source of a chemical or biological terrorist attack could also be used to find someone submerged in an avalanche. The search algorithm allows for small robots (described as cockroach-sized) to “swarm” a search area. Researchers say that this distributed optimization algorithm can help find avalanche victims four times faster than current search mechanisms. For a person buried in an avalanche, the chance of survival plummets after 20 minutes, so every moment counts.
An avy dog in training is picking up scent
Sarah McLear
While rescue gear has been evolving, predicting when a slab will fall remains an emerging science — kind of where weather forecasting science was in the 1980s. Avalanche forecasting still relies on documenting avalanches by going out and looking,” says Ethan Greene, director of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center (CAIC). “So if there's a big snowstorm, and as you might remember, most avalanches happened during snowstorms, we could have 10,000 avalanches that release and we document 50,” says Greene. “Avalanche forecasting is essentially pattern recognition,” he adds--and understanding the layering structure of snow.
However, determining where the hazards lie can be tricky. While a dense layer of snow over a softer, weaker layer may be a recipe for an avalanche, there’s so much variability in snowpack that no one formula can predict the trigger. Further, observing and measuring snow at a single point may not be representative of all nearby slopes. Finally, there’s not enough historical data to help avalanche scientists create better prediction models.
That, however, may be changing.
Last year, an international group of researchers created computer simulations of snow cover using 16 years of meteorological data to forecast avalanche hazards, publishing their research in Cold Regions Science and Technology. They believe their models, which categorize different kinds of avalanches, can support forecasting and determine whether the avalanche is natural (caused by temperature changes, wind, additional snowfall) or artificial (triggered by a human or animal).
With smell receptors ranging from 800 million for an average dog, to 4 billion for scent hounds, canines remain key to finding people caught in slides.
With data from two sites in British Columbia and one in Switzerland, researchers built computer simulations of five different avalanche types. “In terms of real time avalanche forecasting, this has potential to fill in a lot of data gaps, where we don't have field observations of what the snow looks like,” says Simon Horton, a postdoctoral fellow with the Simon Fraser University Centre for Natural Hazards Research and a forecaster with Avalanche Canada, who participated in the study. While complex models that simulate snowpack layers have been around for a few decades, they weren’t easy to apply until recently. “It's been difficult to find out how to apply that to actual decision-making and improving safety,” says Horton. If you can derive avalanche problem types from simulated snowpack properties, he says, you’ll learn “a lot about how you want to manage that risk.”
The five categories include “new snow,” which is unstable and slides down the slope, “wet snow,” when rain or heat makes it liquidly, as well as “wind-drifted snow,” “persistent weak layers” and “old snow.” “That's when there's some type of deeply buried weak layer in the snow that releases without any real change in the weather,” Horton explains. “These ones tend to cause the most accidents.” One step by a person on that structurally weak layer of snow will cause a slide. Horton is hopeful that computer simulations of avalanche types can be used by scientists in different snow climates to help predict hazard levels.
Greene is doubtful. “If you have six slopes that are lined up next to each other, and you're going to try to predict which one avalanches and the exact dimensions and what time, that's going to be really hard to do. And I think it's going to be a long time before we're able to do that,” says Greene.
What both researchers do agree on, though, is that what avalanche prediction really needs is better imagery through satellite detection. “Just being able to count the number of avalanches that are out there will have a huge impact on what we do,” Greene says. “[Satellites] will change what we do, dramatically.” In a 2022 paper, scientists at the University of Aberdeen in England used satellites to study two deadly Himalayan avalanches. The imaging helped them determine that sediment from a 2016 ice avalanche plus subsequent snow avalanches contributed to the 2021 avalanche that caused a flash flood, killing over 200 people. The researchers say that understanding the avalanches characteristics through satellite imagery can inform them how one such event increases the magnitude of another in the same area.
Avy dogs trainers hide in dug-out holes in the snow, teaching the dogs to find buried victims
Sarah McLear
Lifesaving combo: human tech and Mother Nature’s gear
Even as avalanche forecasting evolves, dogs with their built-in rescue mechanisms will remain invaluable. With smell receptors ranging from 800 million for an average dog, to 4 billion for scent hounds, canines remain key to finding people caught in slides. (Humans in comparison, have a meager 12 million.) A new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience revealed that in dogs smell and vision are connected in the brain, which has not been found in other animals. “They can detect the smell of their owner's fingerprints on a glass slide six weeks after they touched it,” says Nicholas Dodman, professor emeritus at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University. “And they can track from a boat where a box filled with meat was buried in the water, 100 feet below,” says Dodman, who is also co-founder and president of the Center for Canine Behavior Studies.
Another recent study from Queens College in Belfast, United Kingdom, further confirms that dogs can smell when humans are stressed. They can also detect the smell of a person’s breath and the smell of the skin cells of a deceased person.
The emerging avalanche-predicting human-made tech and the incredible nature-made tech of dogs’ olfactory talents is the lifesaving “equipment” that Leffler believes in. Even when human-made technology develops further, it will be most efficient when used together with the millions of dogs’ smell receptors, Leffler believes. “It is a combination of technology and the avalanche dog that will always be effective in finding an avalanche victim.”
Few things are more painful than a urinary tract infection (UTI). Common in men and women, these infections account for more than 8 million trips to the doctor each year and can cause an array of uncomfortable symptoms, from a burning feeling during urination to fever, vomiting, and chills. For an unlucky few, UTIs can be chronic—meaning that, despite treatment, they just keep coming back.
But new research, presented at the European Association of Urology (EAU) Congress in Paris this week, brings some hope to people who suffer from UTIs.
Clinicians from the Royal Berkshire Hospital presented the results of a long-term, nine-year clinical trial where 89 men and women who suffered from recurrent UTIs were given an oral vaccine called MV140, designed to prevent the infections. Every day for three months, the participants were given two sprays of the vaccine (flavored to taste like pineapple) and then followed over the course of nine years. Clinicians analyzed medical records and asked the study participants about symptoms to check whether any experienced UTIs or had any adverse reactions from taking the vaccine.
The results showed that across nine years, 48 of the participants (about 54%) remained completely infection-free. On average, the study participants remained infection free for 54.7 months—four and a half years.
“While we need to be pragmatic, this vaccine is a potential breakthrough in preventing UTIs and could offer a safe and effective alternative to conventional treatments,” said Gernot Bonita, Professor of Urology at the Alta Bro Medical Centre for Urology in Switzerland, who is also the EAU Chairman of Guidelines on Urological Infections.
The news comes as a relief not only for people who suffer chronic UTIs, but also to doctors who have seen an uptick in antibiotic-resistant UTIs in the past several years. Because UTIs usually require antibiotics, patients run the risk of developing a resistance to the antibiotics, making infections more difficult to treat. A preventative vaccine could mean less infections, less antibiotics, and less drug resistance overall.
“Many of our participants told us that having the vaccine restored their quality of life,” said Dr. Bob Yang, Consultant Urologist at the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, who helped lead the research. “While we’re yet to look at the effect of this vaccine in different patient groups, this follow-up data suggests it could be a game-changer for UTI prevention if it’s offered widely, reducing the need for antibiotic treatments.”
MILESTONE: Doctors have transplanted a pig organ into a human for the first time in history
Surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital made history last week when they successfully transplanted a pig kidney into a human patient for the first time ever.
The recipient was a 62-year-old man named Richard Slayman who had been living with end-stage kidney disease caused by diabetes. While Slayman had received a kidney transplant in 2018 from a human donor, his diabetes ultimately caused the kidney to fail less than five years after the transplant. Slayman had undergone dialysis ever since—a procedure that uses an artificial kidney to remove waste products from a person’s blood when the kidneys are unable to—but the dialysis frequently caused blood clots and other complications that landed him in the hospital multiple times.
As a last resort, Slayman’s kidney specialist suggested a transplant using a pig kidney provided by eGenesis, a pharmaceutical company based in Cambridge, Mass. The highly experimental surgery was made possible with the Food and Drug Administration’s “compassionate use” initiative, which allows patients with life-threatening medical conditions access to experimental treatments.
The new frontier of organ donation
Like Slayman, more than 100,000 people are currently on the national organ transplant waiting list, and roughly 17 people die every day waiting for an available organ. To make up for the shortage of human organs, scientists have been experimenting for the past several decades with using organs from animals such as pigs—a new field of medicine known as xenotransplantation. But putting an animal organ into a human body is much more complicated than it might appear, experts say.
“The human immune system reacts incredibly violently to a pig organ, much more so than a human organ,” said Dr. Joren Madsen, director of the Mass General Transplant Center. Even with immunosuppressant drugs that suppress the body’s ability to reject the transplant organ, Madsen said, a human body would reject an animal organ “within minutes.”
So scientists have had to use gene-editing technology to change the animal organs so that they would work inside a human body. The pig kidney in Slayman’s surgery, for instance, had been genetically altered using CRISPR-Cas9 technology to remove harmful pig genes and add human ones. The kidney was also edited to remove pig viruses that could potentially infect a human after transplant.
With CRISPR technology, scientists have been able to prove that interspecies organ transplants are not only possible, but may be able to successfully work long term, too. In the past several years, scientists were able to transplant a pig kidney into a monkey and have the monkey survive for more than two years. More recently, doctors have transplanted pig hearts into human beings—though each recipient of a pig heart only managed to live a couple of months after the transplant. In one of the patients, researchers noted evidence of a pig virus in the man’s heart that had not been identified before the surgery and could be a possible explanation for his heart failure.
So far, so good
Slayman and his medical team ultimately decided to pursue the surgery—and the risk paid off. When the pig organ started producing urine at the end of the four-hour surgery, the entire operating room erupted in applause.
Slayman is currently receiving an infusion of immunosuppressant drugs to prevent the kidney from being rejected, while his doctors monitor the kidney’s function with frequent ultrasounds. Slayman is reported to be “recovering well” at Massachusetts General Hospital and is expected to be discharged within the next several days.