BLOGS

A branching blood vessel network fabricated using the ESCAPE process to form complex tissues. This image shows the cell nuclei color-coded based on height.

Credit: Subramanian Sundaram, Boston University and Wyss Institute, Harvard University

Topics: 3D Printing, Additive Manufacturing, Biology, Tissue Engineering

The manufacturing technique known as 3D printing, now being used everywhere, from aircraft manufacturers to public libraries, has never been more affordable or accessible. Biomedical engineering has particularly benefited from 3D printing as prosthetic devices can be produced and tested more rapidly than ever before. However, 3D printing still faces challenges when printing living tissues, partly due to their complexity and fragility.

Now, with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, a research team at Boston University (BU) and the Wyss Institute at Harvard University has pioneered the use of gallium, a metal that can be molded at room temperature, to create tissue structures in various shapes and sizes.

This innovative approach to fabrication, engineered sacrificial capillary pumps for evacuation (ESCAPE), was highlighted in a recent study published in Nature, where the team used gallium casts to mold biomaterials. The scaffolds left behind by these casts are then filled with cells cultured to form tissue structures. Vascular structures were some of the first produced using ESCAPE, particularly because of the challenges faced due to blood vessel complexity. Few techniques exist to build large (millimeter-scale) and small (micrometer-scale) structures in scaffolds made of natural materials, making this multiscale fabrication capability a novel approach.

"ESCAPE can be used on several tissue architectures, but we started with vascular forms because blood vessel networks feature many different length scales," said Christopher Chen, director of BU's Biological Design Center and senior author on the study. Chen is also the deputy director of CELL-MET, an NSF Engineering Research Center at BU funded by a $34 million award from NSF, and co-principal investigator on the award for the NSF Science and Technology Center for Engineering MechanoBiology at the University of Pennsylvania. "Our blood vessel demonstrations include trees with many branches, including dead ends and portions that experience fluid flow. This allows us to model a range of healthy structures as well as diseased abnormalities."

Biofabricating human tissues enhanced through use of gallium, National Science Foundation

The "woolly mouse" was developed by Colossal Biosciences by editing genes to give the mouse a bushier, thicker coat, akin to that of the extinct woolly mammoth. Colossal

Topics: Biology, Biotechnology, Research

Note: I had a pet hamster named "Woolly," that looked remarkably like this one. I'm sure cloning wasn't at this point decades ago. He sadly only lasted a little over a year.

The biotech company Colossal Biosciences has long aspired to bring back the extinct woolly mammoth, which roamed the Northern Hemisphere thousands of years ago, during the last ice age. But for now, as a step along the way, the company has come up with something decidedly less mammoth: meet the woolly mouse.

On Tuesday Colossal announced this lab-born animal, which features shaggy, mammothlike fur and has cold-adapted traits such as the way in which it stores and burns fat. Researchers retrieved and sequenced ancient mammoth DNA from preserved skin, bone and hair to learn which genes controlled traits such as coat color and cold tolerance. They altered the corresponding genes in lab mice and made other alterations in the rodents’ genome.

What was the purpose of this feat of genetic engineering? Colossal’s pitch is that, with biodiversity going the way of the dodo (which the company also hopes to resurrect), saving existing species will require tweaking their DNA to make them more resilient. The researchers at the company also claim that bringing back extinct species can help the environment. For example, they say mammoths can help fight climate change by tamping down Arctic permafrost, reducing how much of it is thawing and releasing methane into the atmosphere. Company co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm puts the approach in startling terms: “Why leave nature to chance?” In pursuit of such “de-extinction” goals, Colossal has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from celebrities to the CIA.

Company Seeking to Resurrect the Woolly Mammoth Creates a 'Woolly Mouse', Adam Popescu, Andrea Thompson, Scientific American

Topics: African Americans, Biology, Black History Month, Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Diversity in Science, Medicine

“Father of the Blood Bank”
June 3, 1904 – April 1, 1950
Renowned surgeon and pioneer in the preservation of life-saving blood plasma
Major scientific achievements:

• Discovered method for long-term storage of blood plasma
• Organized America's first large-scale blood bank

Dr. Charles Richard Drew broke barriers in a racially divided America to become one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. His pioneering research and systematic developments in the use and preservation of blood plasma during World War II not only saved thousands of lives but innovated the nation’s blood banking process and standardized procedures for long-term blood preservation and storage techniques adapted by the American Red Cross.

A native Washingtonian, Drew was an average student but a gifted athlete recruited in 1922 on a football and track and field scholarship by Amherst College in Massachusetts. He was one of only 13 African Americans in a student body of 600, where the racial climate exposed him to hostility from opposing teams. His own football team passed him over as captain his senior year even though he was the team’s best athlete.

Beyond sports, Drew didn’t have a clear direction until a biology professor piqued his interest in medicine. Like many other fields, medicine was largely segregated, greatly limiting education and career options for African Americans. For Drew, the narrowed road would lead him to McGill University College of Medicine in Montréal. There, he distinguished himself, winning the annual scholarship prize in neuroanatomy; becoming elected to the medical honor society Alpha Omega Alpha; and staffing the McGill Medical Journal. He also won the J. Francis Williams Prize in medicine after beating the top 5 students in an exam competition. In 1933, Drew received his MD and CM (Master of Surgery) degrees, graduating second in a class of 137.

Drew’s interest in transfusion medicine began during his internship and surgical residency at Montreal Hospital (1933-1935) working with bacteriology professor John Beattie on ways to treat shock with fluid replacement. Drew aspired to continue training in transfusion therapy at the Mayo Clinic, but racial prejudices at major American medical centers barred black scholars from their practices. He would instead join the faculty at Howard University College of Medicine, starting as a pathology instructor, and then progressing to surgical instructor and chief surgical resident at Freedmen's Hospital.

Dr. Charles Richard Drew, American Chemical Society

This chip-based "tractor-beam," which uses an intensely focused beam of light to capture and manipulate biological particles without damaging the cells, could help biologists study the mechanisms of diseases. Credits: Credit: Sampson Wilcox, RLE

Topics: Biology, Biotechnology, Optical Tweezers, Research

MIT researchers have developed a miniature, chip-based “tractor beam,” like the one that captures the Millennium Falcon in the film “Star Wars,” that could someday help biologists and clinicians study DNA, classify cells, and investigate the mechanisms of disease.

Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, the device uses a beam of light emitted by a silicon-photonics chip to manipulate particles millimeters away from the chip surface. The light can penetrate the glass coverslips that protect samples used in biological experiments, enabling cells to remain in a sterile environment.

Traditional optical tweezers, which trap and manipulate particles using light, usually require bulky microscope setups, but chip-based optical tweezers could offer a more compact, mass manufacturable, broadly accessible, and high-throughput solution for optical manipulation in biological experiments.

However, other similar integrated optical tweezers can only capture and manipulate cells very close to or directly on the chip surface. This contaminates the chip and can stress the cells, limiting compatibility with standard biological experiments.

Using an integrated optical phased array, MIT researchers have developed a new modality for integrated optical tweezers that enables trapping and tweezing of cells more than a hundred times further away from the chip surface.

MIT engineers create a chip-based tractor beam for biological particles, Adam Zewe, MIT Press, October 3, 2024

Topics: Astrobiology, Biology, Instrumentation, James Web Space Telescope, Research, SETI

"The Secret Life of the Universe" by Dr. Nathalie Cabrol, the SETI Institute's chief scientist and Director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute, is coming out this week, both in the US (August 13, 2024) and in the UK (August 15, 2024). Scriber/Simon & Schuster publishes both editions. Cabrol articulates an overview of where we stand today in our search for life in the universe, what's coming, and how looking out for life beyond Earth teaches us about our place on our planet.

Here is an excerpt to inspire you:

On July 11, 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) returned its first images, penetrating the wall of time to show us the universe just a few hundred million years after its formation. In a marvelous cosmic irony, this immersion into the depths of our origins propels us into the future, where a revolution looms large in astronomy, in cosmology, and in astrobiology—the search for life in the universe. JWST comes after a few decades of space and planetary exploration during which we have discovered countless habitable environments in our solar system—for (simple) life as we know it, but also thousands of exoplanets in our galaxy, some of them located in the habitable zone of their parent stars.

We are living in a golden age in astrobiology, the beginning of a fantastic odyssey in which much remains to be written, but where our first steps bring the promise of prodigious discoveries. And these first steps have already transformed our species in one generation in a way that we cannot foresee just yet.

Copernicus taught us long ago that the Earth was neither at the center of the universe nor the center of the solar system, for that matter. We also learned from the work of Harlow Shapley and Henrietta Swan Leavitt that the solar system does not even occupy any particularly prominent place in our galaxy. It is simply tucked away at the inner edge of Orion’s spur in the Milky Way, 27,000 light-years from its center, in a galactic suburb of sorts. Our sun is an average-sized star located in a galaxy propelled at 2.1 million kilometers per hour in a visible universe that counts maybe 125 billion such cosmic islands, give or take a few billion. In this immensity, the Kepler mission taught us that planetary systems are the rule, not the exception.

This is how, in a mere quarter of a century, we found ourselves exploring a universe populated by as many planets as stars. Yet, looking up and far into what seems to be an infinite ocean of possibilities, the only echoes we have received so far from our explorations have been barren planetary landscapes and thundering silence. Could it be that we are the only guests at the universal table? Maybe. As a scientist, I cannot wholly discount this hypothesis, but it seems very unlikely and “an awful waste of space,” and for more than one reason.

The Secret Life of the Universe, ?ETI Institute

Scientists have found elevated mercury levels in dolphins throughout the Southeast since 2007. Sources: Bryan, Damseaux, Griffin, Stavros, Woshner. Credit: N. Hanacek/NIST

Topics: Biology, Chemistry, Civilization, Environment

In a study with potential implications for the oceans and human health, scientists reported elevated mercury levels in dolphins in the U.S. Southeast, with the greatest levels found in dolphins in Florida’s St. Joseph and Choctawhatchee Bays.

Dolphins are considered a “sentinel species” for oceans and human health because, like us, they are high up in the food chain, live long lives, and share certain physiological traits with humans. Some staples of their diet, such as spot, croaker, weakfish, and other small fish, are most vulnerable to mercury pollution and are also eaten by people.  

The study, which appeared in the journal Toxics, drew no conclusions about Florida and Georgia residents’ mercury levels or the potential health risks to humans. It did, however, cite previous research by a different group of researchers that found a correlation between high mercury levels in dolphins in Florida’s Indian River Lagoon and humans living in the area.

“As a sentinel species, the bottlenose dolphin data presented here can direct future studies to evaluate mercury exposure to human residents” in the Southeast and other potentially affected areas in the United States, the authors of the study in Toxics wrote.

Research Finds Dolphins With Elevated Mercury Levels in Florida and Georgia, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

Plastic chokes a canal in Chennai, India. Credit: R. Satish Babu/AFP via Getty

Topics: Applied Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Environment, Medicine

People who had tiny plastic particles lodged in a key blood vessel were more likely to experience heart attack, stroke or death during a three-year study.

Plastics are just about everywhere — food packaging, tyres, clothes, water pipes. And they shed microscopic particles that end up in the environment and can be ingested or inhaled by people.

Now, the first data of their kind show a link between these microplastics and human health. A study of more than 200 people undergoing surgery found that nearly 60% had microplastics or even smaller nanoplastics in a main artery¹. Those who did were 4.5 times more likely to experience a heart attack, a stroke, or death in the approximately 34 months after the surgery than were those whose arteries were plastic-free.

“This is a landmark trial,” says Robert Brook, a physician-scientist at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, who studies the environmental effects on cardiovascular health and was not involved with the study. “This will be the launching pad for further studies across the world to corroborate, extend, and delve into the degree of the risk that micro- and nanoplastics pose.”

But Brook, other researchers and the authors themselves caution that this study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine on 6 March, does not show that the tiny pieces caused poor health. Other factors that the researchers did not study, such as socio-economic status, could be driving ill health rather than the plastics themselves, they say.

Landmark study links microplastics to serious health problems, Max Kozlov, Nature.

Climate of fear Anti-science protestors led to the closure of the High Flux Beam Reactor at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US 25 years ago using tactics that are widespread today. (Courtesy: iStock/DanielVilleneuve)

Topics: Biology, Cancer, Carl Sagan, Civilization, Climate Change, Philosophy, Physics

I typically don't comment on articles, but this one resonated with my memories of Carl Sagan desperately trying to raise the critical thinking skills of an entire essential nation with "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark." The host of Cosmos would succumb to pneumonia as a consequence of bone marrow disease. I will be the age Carl was when he passed away this year, 62, but not as accomplished as he did in the six decades we all had access to him.

The framework of our current duress was already here in the form of celebrity worship, gossip columns, and talk shows where sensationalism equaled eyeballs, just as the Internet rouses the primitive lizard portion of our brains to be afraid, get angry, and "buy-purchase-consume" products (a friend who's a sound engineer likes to say that a lot).

Underhand tactics by environmental activists led to the closure of a famous physics facility 25 years ago. We can still learn much from the incident, says Robert P Crease.

Fake facts, conspiracy theories, nuclear fear, science denial, baseless charges of corruption, and the shouting down of reputable health officials. All these things happened 25 years ago, long before the days of social media, in a bipartisan, celebrity-driven episode of science denial.  Yet the story offers valuable lessons for what works and what does not (mostly the latter) for anyone wanting to head off such incidents.

The episode in question concerned one of the more valuable scientific facilities in the US, the High Flux Beam Reactor (HFBR) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. As I mentioned in a previous column and in my book The Leak, the HFBR was a successful research instrument that was used to make medical isotopes and study everything from superconductors to proteins and metals. “Experimentalists saw the reactor as the place to go,” recalls the physicist William Magwood IV, then at the US Department of Energy.

But in 1997, lab scientists discovered a leak of water from a pool located in the same building as the reactor, where its spent fuel was stored. The leak contained tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that decays with a half-life of about 12 years, releasing low-energy electrons that can be stopped by a few sheets of paper. The total amount of tritium in the leak was about that in typical self-illuminating “EXIT” signs.

The protestors’ tactics are a familiar part of today’s political environment: tell people they are in danger and insist that anyone who says otherwise is lying.

The article goes on to recount the actor Alec Baldwin using his celebrity to put a ten-year-old child on the Montell Williams Show to claim that the tritium and the research facility caused his cancer. It wasn't true, but it was LOUD, drowning out the experts who are used to spirited peer review and erudite discussions of research, not tears and gnashing of teeth.

Montell Williams ended his talk show after announcing that he had multiple sclerosis. Alec Baldwin, though I enjoyed his SNL skits, has other pressing issues.

I have a physicist friend who's using tritium in his research with optical tweezers, separating isotopes to detect and treat cancers, among other applications. I am opting not to give his website as those same elements described in the article about Brookhaven National Labs have metastasized into our current societal mass psychosis. If his research leads to your cancer cure, you can thank him later.

Twenty-five years ago, we weren't as far along in climate disruption as we are now. Twenty-five years ago, CNN was 19 years old, and its clones, Fox and MSNBC, were 3 years old. Five years after the Y2K scare (exquisitely setting us up for election 2000 and 9/11), humanity further siloed itself into warring tribes, first posting on Internet bulletin boards, MySpace. Then, the logical progression was to Facebook, Twitter (now X), and its myriad progeny.

A side note: CERN would go on to discover the Higgs Boson because we, in the spirit of fiscal stewardship, closed the superconducting collider in Waxahachie, Texas, 48 kilometers south of Dallas. Peter Higgs and François Englert owe their 2013 Physics Nobel Prize to Switzerland. U-S-A. U-S-A.

How much further along in cancer research and nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels would we be if, prior to Facebook and the former Twitter, we exercised a little critical thinking and common sense? I'm not talking about tritium, but fission reactors, which we know how to build (fusion, though cleaner and less radioactive, is still far off), but the environmental activists have terrorized anyone from building newer and safer facilities that might have had some positive impact on our warming climate. To paraphrase a famous saying, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." Our air quality improved during the pandemic, so the logic leads to upgrading public transportation to something matching other countries that rely on it more than we do, or within our borders, the subway systems in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, or Washington, DC. You end up doing nothing of any importance. We could replace the fission reactors one by one as fusion comes online.

That is what enrages and disappoints me.

The American reactor that was closed by fake news, Robert P Crease, Physics World

PAC1R-expressing dorsal raphe neurons in the mouse brain (red) serve as the projection targets for PACAP parabrachial neurons to mediate panic-like behavioral and physical symptoms. Credit: Salk Institute

Topics: Biology, Medicine, Research, Science

Overwhelming fear, sweaty palms, shortness of breath, rapid heart rate—these are the symptoms of a panic attack, which people with panic disorder have frequently and unexpectedly. Creating a map of the regions, neurons, and connections in the brain that mediate these panic attacks can provide guidance for developing more effective panic disorder therapeutics.

Now, Salk researchers have begun to construct that map by discovering a brain circuit that mediates panic disorder. This circuit consists of specialized neurons that send and receive a neuropeptide—a small protein that sends messages throughout the brain—called PACAP. What's more, they determined that PACAP and the neurons that produce its receptor are possible druggable targets for new panic disorder treatments.

The findings were published in Nature Neuroscience.

"We've been exploring different areas of the brain to understand where panic attacks start," says senior author Sung Han, associate professor at Salk.

"Previously, we thought the amygdala, known as the brain's fear center, was mainly responsible—but even people who have damage to their amygdala can still experience panic attacks, so we knew we needed to look elsewhere. Now, we've found a specific brain circuit outside of the amygdala that is linked to panic attacks and could inspire new panic disorder treatments that differ from currently available panic disorder medications that typically target the brain's serotonin system."

Scientists uncover key brain pathway mediating panic disorder symptoms, Salk Institute.

Researchers are working to overcome challenges related to nanoscale optoelectronic interconnects, which use light to transmit signals around an integrated circuit. IMAGE: PROVIDED BY NCNST

Topics: Biology, Materials Science, Nanoengineering, Nanomaterials, Nanotechnology, Quantum Mechanics

The promise of nanotechnology, the engineering of machines and systems at the nanoscale, is anything but tiny. Over the past decade alone, there has been an explosion in research on how to design and build components that solve problems across almost every sector, and nanotechnology innovations have led to huge advancements in our quest to address humanity’s grand challenges, from healthcare to water to food security.

Like any area of scholarship, there are still so many unknowns. And yet, there are more talented scientists and engineers endeavoring to better comprehend and harness the power of nanotechnology than ever before. The future is bright for nanotechnology and its applications.

In celebration of its 20th anniversary, the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, China (NCNST), a subsidiary of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences, partnered with Science Custom Publishing to survey nanoscience experts from the journal and across the globe about the most knotty and fascinating questions that still need to be answered if we are to advance nanotechnology in society.

The Tiny Ten: Experts weigh in on the top 10 challenges remaining for nanoscience & nanotechnology, Science Magazine

An Anthrobot is shown, depth colored, with a corona of cilia that provides locomotion for the bot. Credit: Gizem Gumuskaya, Tufts University

Topics: Applied Physics, Biology, Biomimetics, Biotechnology, Research, Robotics

Researchers at Tufts University and Harvard University's Wyss Institute have created tiny biological robots that they call Anthrobots from human tracheal cells that can move across a surface and have been found to encourage the growth of neurons across a region of damage in a lab dish.

The multicellular robots, ranging in size from the width of a human hair to the point of a sharpened pencil, were made to self-assemble and shown to have a remarkable healing effect on other cells. The discovery is a starting point for the researchers' vision to use patient-derived biobots as new therapeutic tools for regeneration, healing, and treatment of disease.

The work follows from earlier research in the laboratories of Michael Levin, Vannevar Bush, Professor of Biology at Tufts University School of Arts & Sciences, and Josh Bongard at the University of Vermont, in which they created multicellular biological robots from frog embryo cells called Xenobots, capable of navigating passageways, collecting material, recording information, healing themselves from injury, and even replicating for a few cycles on their own.

At the time, researchers did not know if these capabilities were dependent on their being derived from an amphibian embryo or if biobots could be constructed from cells of other species.

In the current study, published in Advanced Science, Levin, along with Ph.D. student Gizem Gumuskaya, discovered that bots can, in fact, be created from adult human cells without any genetic modification, and they are demonstrating some capabilities beyond what was observed with the Xenobots.

The discovery starts to answer a broader question that the lab has posed—what are the rules that govern how cells assemble and work together in the body, and can the cells be taken out of their natural context and recombined into different "body plans" to carry out other functions by design?

Anthrobots: Scientists build tiny biological robots from human tracheal cells, Tufts University

A mathematical tool called a fast Fourier transform maps the structure in a way that reveals the 12-fold symmetry of the quasicrystal. The fast Fourier transform of the electron microscope image of the quasicrystal is shown on the left, while the transform of the simulated crystal is shown on the right. Image credit: Mirkin Research Group, Northwestern University, and Glotzer Group, University of Michigan.

Topics: Biology, DNA, Nanoengineering, Nanomaterials, Nanotechnology

ANN ARBOR—Nanoengineers have created a quasicrystal—a scientifically intriguing and technologically promising material structure—from nanoparticles using DNA, the molecule that encodes life.

The team, led by researchers at Northwestern University, the University of Michigan, and the Center for Cooperative Research in Biomaterials in San Sebastian, Spain, reports the results in Nature Materials.

Unlike ordinary crystals, which are defined by a repeating structure, the patterns in quasicrystals don’t repeat. Quasicrystals built from atoms can have exceptional properties—for example, absorbing heat and light differently, exhibiting unusual electronic properties such as conducting electricity without resistance, or their surfaces being very hard or very slippery.

Engineers studying nanoscale assembly often view nanoparticles as a kind of ‘designer atom,’ which provides a new level of control over synthetic materials. One of the challenges is directing particles to assemble into desired structures with useful qualities, and in building this first DNA-assembled quasicrystal, the team entered a new frontier in nanomaterial design.

“The existence of quasicrystals has been a puzzle for decades, and their discovery appropriately was awarded a Nobel Prize,” said Chad Mirkin, the George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University and co-corresponding author of the study. “Although there are now several known examples, discovered in nature or through serendipitous routes, our research demystifies their formation and, more importantly, shows how we can harness the programmable nature of DNA to design and assemble quasicrystals deliberately.”

Nanoparticle quasicrystal constructed with DNA, Kate McAlpine, University of Michigan

The sea floor near Australia’s Casey station in Antarctica has been found to have levels of pollution comparable to those in Rio de Janeiro’s harbor. Credit: Torsten Blackwood/AFP via Getty

Topics: Antarctica, Biology, Chemistry, Environment, Physics, Research

Antarctica is often described as one of the most pristine places in the world, but it has a dirty secret. Parts of the sea floor near Australia’s Casey research station are as polluted as the harbor in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, according to a study published in PLoS ONE in August.

The contamination is likely to be widespread across Antarctica’s older research stations, says study co-author Jonathan Stark, a marine ecologist at the Australian Antarctic Division in Hobart. “These contaminants accumulate over long time frames and don’t just go away,” he says.

Stark and his colleagues found high concentrations of hydrocarbons — compounds found in fuels — and heavy metals, such as lead, copper, and zinc. Many of the samples were also loaded with polychlorinated biphenyls, highly carcinogenic chemical compounds that were common before their international ban in 2001.

When the researchers compared some of the samples with data from the World Harbor Project — an international collaboration that tracks large urban waterways — they found that lead, copper, and zinc levels in some cases were similar to those seen in parts of Sydney Harbour and Rio de Janeiro over the past two decades.

Widespread pollution

The problem of pollution is not unique to Casey station, says Ceisha Poirot, manager of policy, environment, and safety at Antarctica New Zealand in Christchurch. “All national programs are dealing with this issue,” she says. At New Zealand’s Scott Base — which is being redeveloped — contamination left from past fuel spills and poor waste management has been detected in soil and marine sediments. More of this historical pollution will emerge as the climate warms, says Poirot. “Things that were once frozen in the soil are now becoming more mobile,” she says.

Most of Antarctica’s contamination is due to historically poor waste management. In the old days, waste was often just dumped a small distance from research stations, says Terence Palmer, a marine scientist at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi.

Research stations started to get serious about cleaning up their act in 1991. In that year, an international agreement known as the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, or the Madrid Protocol, was adopted. This designated Antarctica as a “natural reserve, devoted to peace and science,” and directed nations to monitor environmental impacts related to their activities. But much of the damage had already been done — roughly two-thirds of Antarctic research stations were built before 1991.

Antarctic research stations have polluted a pristine wilderness, Gemma Conroy, Nature.

An RNA-making molecule crystallizes on magnetite, which can bias the process toward a single chiral form. S. FURKAN OZTURK

Topics: Biology, Biotechnology, Chemistry, Magnetism, Materials Science

In 1848, French chemist Louis Pasteur discovered that some molecules essential for life exist in mirror-image forms, much like our left and right hands. Today, we know biology chooses just one of these “chiral” forms: DNA, RNA, and their building blocks are all right-handed, whereas amino acids and proteins are all left-handed. Pasteur, who saw hints of this selectivity, or “homochirality,” thought magnetic fields might somehow explain it, but its origin has remained one of biology’s great mysteries. Now, it turns out Pasteur may have been onto something.

In three new papers, researchers suggest magnetic minerals common on early Earth could have caused key biomolecules to accumulate on their surface in just one mirror image form, setting off positive feedback that continued to favor the same form. “It’s a real breakthrough,” says Jack Szostak, an origin of life chemist at the University of Chicago who was not involved with the new work. “Homochirality is essential to get biology started, and this is [a possible]—and I would say very likely—solution.”

Chemical reactions are typically unbiased, yielding equal amounts of right- and left-handed molecules. But life requires selectivity: Only right-handed DNA, for example, has the correct twist to interact properly with other chiral molecules. To get [life], “you’ve got to break the mirror, or you can’t pull it off,” says Gerald Joyce, an origin of life chemist and president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

Over the past century, researchers have proposed various mechanisms for skewing the first biomolecules, including cosmic rays and polarized light. Both can cause an initial bias favoring either right- or left-handed molecules, but they don’t directly explain how this initial bias was amplified to create the large reservoirs of chiral molecules likely needed to make the first cells. An explanation that creates an initial bias is a good start but “not sufficient,” says Dimitar Sasselov, a physicist at Harvard University and a leader of the new work.

‘Breakthrough’ could explain why life molecules are left- or right-handed, Robert F. Service, Science.org.

The galaxy observed by Webb shows an Einstein ring caused by a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing.  Credit: S. Doyle / J. Spilker

Topics: Astrobiology, Biology, James Webb Space Telescope, Space Exploration

Researchers have detected complex organic molecules in a galaxy more than 12 billion light-years away from Earth—the most distant galaxy in which these molecules are now known to exist. Thanks to the capabilities of the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope and careful analyses from the research team, a new study lends critical insight into the complex chemical interactions that occurred in the first galaxies in the early universe.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign astronomy and physics professor Joaquin Vieira and graduate student Kedar Phadke collaborated with researchers at Texas A&M University and an international team of scientists to differentiate between infrared signals generated by some of the more massive and larger dust grains in the galaxy and those of the newly observed hydrocarbon molecules.

The study findings are published in the journal Nature.

"This project started when I was in graduate school studying hard-to-detect, very distant galaxies obscured by dust," Vieira said. "Dust grains absorb and re-emit about half of the stellar radiation produced in the universe, making infrared light from distant objects extremely faint or undetectable through ground-based telescopes."

In the new study, the JWST received a boost from what the researchers call "nature's magnifying glass"—a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. "This magnification happens when two galaxies are almost perfectly aligned from the Earth's point of view, and light from the background galaxy is warped and magnified by the foreground galaxy into a ring-like shape, known as an Einstein ring," Vieira said.

Webb Space Telescope detects the universe's most distant complex organic molecules, Lois Yoksoulian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The disinfectant powder is stirred in bacteria-contaminated water (upper left). The mixture is exposed to sunlight, which rapidly kills all the bacteria (upper right). A magnet collects the metallic powder after disinfection (lower right). The powder is then reloaded into another beaker of contaminated water, and the disinfection process is repeated (lower left). (Image credit: Tong Wu/Stanford University)

Topics: Biology, Chemistry, Environment, Materials Science, Nanotechnology

When exposed to sunlight, a low-cost, recyclable powder can kill thousands of waterborne bacteria per second. Stanford and SLAC scientists say the ultrafast disinfectant could be a revolutionary advance for 2 billion people worldwide without access to safe drinking water.

At least 2 billion people worldwide routinely drink water contaminated with disease-causing microbes.

Now, scientists at Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have invented a low-cost, recyclable powder that kills thousands of waterborne bacteria per second when exposed to ordinary sunlight. According to the Stanford and SLAC team, the discovery of this ultrafast disinfectant could be a significant advance for nearly 30 percent of the world’s population with no access to safe drinking water. Their results are published in a May 18 study in Nature Water.

“Waterborne diseases are responsible for 2 million deaths annually, the majority in children under the age of 5,” said study co-lead author Tong Wu, a former postdoctoral scholar of materials science and engineering (MSE) at the Stanford School of Engineering. “We believe that our novel technology will facilitate revolutionary changes in water disinfection and inspire more innovations in this exciting interdisciplinary field.”

Conventional water-treatment technologies include chemicals, which can produce toxic byproducts, and ultraviolet light, which takes a relatively long time to disinfect and requires a source of electricity.

The new disinfectant developed at Stanford is a harmless metallic powder that works by absorbing both UV and high-energy visible light from the sun. The powder consists of nano-size flakes of aluminum oxide, molybdenum sulfide, copper, and iron oxide.

“We only used a tiny amount of these materials,” said senior author Yi Cui, the Fortinet Founders Professor of MSE and of Energy Science & Engineering in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. “The materials are low cost and fairly abundant. The key innovation is that, when immersed in water, they all function together.”

New nontoxic powder uses sunlight to quickly disinfect contaminated drinking water, Mark Shwartz, Stanford News.

Graphical abstract. Credit: Nanomaterials (2023). DOI: 10.3390/nano13081404

Topics: Biology, Environment, Nanomaterials, Nanotechnology

Among the biggest environmental problems of our time, micro- and nanoplastic particles (MNPs) can enter the body in various ways, including through food. And now, for the first time, research conducted at MedUni Vienna has shown how these minute particles manage to breach the blood-brain barrier and, consequently, penetrate the brain. The newly discovered mechanism provides the basis for further research to protect humans and the environment.

Published in the journal Nanomaterials, the study was carried out in an animal model with oral administration of MNPs, in this case, polystyrene, a widely-used plastic found in food packaging. Led by Lukas Kenner (Department of Pathology at MedUni Vienna and Department of Laboratory Animal Pathology at Vetmeduni) and Oldamur Hollóczki (Department of Physical Chemistry, University of Debrecen, Hungary), the research team was able to determine that tiny polystyrene particles could be detected in the brain just two hours after ingestion.

The mechanism that enabled them to breach the blood-brain barrier was previously unknown to medical science. "With the help of computer models, we discovered that a certain surface structure (biomolecular corona) was crucial in enabling plastic particles to pass into the brain," Oldamur Hollóczki explained.

Study shows how tiny plastic particles manage to breach the blood-brain barrier, Medical University of Vienna, Phys.org

Cancer cells are one of the main targets for expanded mRNA-LNP use. Credit: Iliescu Catalin / Alamy

Topics: Biology, Biotechnology, Cancer, COVID-19, Nanotechnology

Note: This is an advertisement on Nature Portfolio discussing that there may be a silver lining in the pandemic we've all experienced.

Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) transport small molecules into the body. The most well-known LNP cargo is mRNA, the key constituent of some of the early vaccines against COVID-19. But that is just one application: LNPs can carry many different types of payload and have applications beyond vaccines.

Barbara Mui has been working on LNPs (and their predecessors, liposomes) since she was a Ph.D. student in Pieter Cullis’s group in the 1990s. “In those days, LNPs encapsulated anti-cancer drugs,” says Mui, who is currently a senior scientist at Acuitas. This company developed the LNPs used in the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. She says it soon became clear that LNPs worked even better as carriers of polynucleotides. “The first one that worked really well was encapsulating small RNAs,” Mui recalls.

But it was mRNA where LNPs proved most effective, primarily because LNPs are comprised of positively charged lipid nanoparticles that encapsulate negatively charged mRNA. Once in the body, LNPs enter cells via endocytosis into endosomes and are released into the cytoplasm. “Without the specially designed chemistry, the LNP and mRNA would be degraded in the endosome,” says Kathryn Whitehead, professor in the departments of chemical engineering and biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

LNPs are an ideal delivery system for mRNA. “COVID accelerated the acceptance of LNPs, and people are more interested in them,” says Mui. LNP-mRNA vaccines for other infectious diseases, such as HIV or malaria, or for non-communicable diseases, such as cancer, could be next. And the potential doesn’t end with mRNA; there is even more scope to adapt LNPs to carry different types of cargo. But to realize these potential benefits, researchers first need to overcome challenges and decrease toxicity, increase their ability to escape from the endosomes, increase their thermostability, and work out how to effectively target LNPs to organs across the body.

Another potential application for LNPs is immunotherapy. Genetically modifying lymphocytes such as T cells or NK cells with chimeric antibody receptors (CARs) has proven useful in blood cancers. Often this process involves extracting lymphocytes from the blood of the person receiving the treatment, editing the cells in culture to express CARs, and then reintroducing them into the blood. However, LNPs could make it possible to express the desired CAR in vivo by shuttling CAR mRNA to the target lymphocytes. Mui has been involved in vivo studies showing this process works in mouse T cells (Rurik, J.G. et al. Science 375, 91-96, 2022). And Vita Golubovskaya, VP of research and development at ProMab Biotechnologies, presented preliminary data (available here) at the CAR-TCR Summit in September 2022 regarding LNPs that direct CAR-mRNA to NK cells, which can then kill target cells. “The RNA-LNP is a very exciting and novel technology that can be used for delivering CAR and bi-specific antibodies against cancer,” she says.

Beyond COVID vaccines: what’s next for lipid nanoparticles? Nature Portfolio

Credit: VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland

Topics: Biology, Biotechnology, Chemistry, Materials Science, Mechanical Engineering

A research group from VTT Technical Research Center of Finland has unlocked the secret behind the extraordinary mechanical properties and ultra-light weight of certain fungi. The complex architectural design of mushrooms could be mimicked and used to create new materials to replace plastics. The research results were published on February 22, 2023, in Science Advances.

VTT's research shows for the first time the complex structural, chemical, and mechanical features adapted throughout the course of evolution by Hoof mushroom (Fomes fomentarius). These features interplay synergistically to create a completely new class of high-performance materials.

Research findings can be used as a source of inspiration to grow from the bottom up the next generation of mechanically robust and lightweight, sustainable materials for various applications under laboratory conditions. These include impact-resistant implants, sports equipment, body armor, and exoskeletons for aircraft, electronics, or windshield surface coatings.

Mushrooms could help replace plastics in new high-performance ultra-light materials, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Phys.org.

Image Source: MedPage Today

Topics: Biology, Biotechnology, Civilization, COVID-19, DNA, Epidemiology

Currently authorized bivalent COVID-19 boosters demonstrated similar protection against symptomatic illness from the XBB/XBB.1.5 Omicron subvariants as from BA.5-related subvariants, according to a CDC study.

From December 2022 to January 2023, the bivalent boosters' vaccine effectiveness (VE) against symptomatic infection was a similar 48% versus XBB/XBB.1.5-related strains and 52% versus BA.5-related sublineages, reported Ruth Link-Gelles, Ph.D., of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, and colleagues in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).

Meanwhile, Pfizer's updated booster demonstrated superior neutralizing antibody activity compared with the company's original product against all the latest Omicron subvariants, including XBB.1, according to Kena Swanson, Ph.D., of Pfizer Vaccine Research and Development in Pearl River, New York and colleagues, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine. Their findings contradict earlier research from other labs that found no significant difference in neutralizing activity with the bivalent over the monovalent vaccine.

According to the latest estimates from the CDC, XBB.1.5 is responsible for 49.1% of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S., while XBB is responsible for another 3.3%.

CDC: Bivalent COVID Vaccines Stop Illness From XBB.1.5

— And Pfizer lab data show better neutralization against the latest variants with the bivalent shot, Ingrid Hein, Staff Writer, MedPage Today