Earth

Acres of asphalt parking lots, unshaded roads, dense apartment complexes and neighborhoods with few parks have taken their toll on the poor. As climate change accelerates, low-income districts in the Southwestern United States are 4 to 7 degrees hotter in Fahrenheit -- on average -- than wealthy neighborhoods in the same metro regions, University of California, Davis, researchers have found in a new analysis.

This study provides the most detailed mapping yet of how summer temperatures in 20 urban centers in California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas affected different neighborhoods between 2018 and 2020. The researchers found even greater heat disparities in California than in other states. The largest disparities showed up in the Riverside and San Bernardino County urban areas.

The unequal impact on Latino communities was especially apparent, the authors said. In Los Angeles on a hot summer day, for example, the most heavily Latino neighborhoods were 6.7 degrees hotter than the least Latino neighborhoods.

"This study provides strong new evidence of climate impact disparities affecting disadvantaged communities, and of the need for proactive steps to reduce those risks," said the study's lead author, John Dialesandro, a doctoral student in geography in the Department of Human Ecology.

The authors said that lower socio-economic groups often have less access to cooled housing, transportation, workplaces and schools. Excess heat can cause heat stroke, exhaustion, and ampli?ed respiratory and cardiovascular issues.

It has long been known that paved surfaces of urban areas absorb and retain solar radiation, increasing urban temperatures. The surrounding suburbs -- with more plant life, parks or proximity to bodies of water -- will be cooler, creating heat islands in the denser areas.

"There is a strong need for state and local governments to take action to mitigate heat disparities by reducing paved surfaces, adding drought-tolerant vegetation, and encouraging building forms that increase shade and reduce temperatures," Dialesandro said.

The study was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Co-authors include Noli Brazi, assistant professor, and Stephen Wheeler, professor, each in the Department of Human Ecology, and Yaser Abunnasr, Department of Landscape Design and Ecosystem Management, American University of Beirut.

Researchers looked at U.S. Census data for each area studied, focusing on median household income and percentage of Latinx, Black and Asian populations in each. They also looked at education levels attained. They then assessed radiant and atmospheric temperatures recorded by satellite on the warmest summer days and nights in those cities over a two-year period.

On average, the poorest 10 percent of neighborhoods in an urban region were 4 degrees hotter than the wealthiest 10 percent on both extreme heat days and average summer days, the study said.

California's urban regions had much larger temperature differences between the wealthiest and poorest neighborhoods compared with regions in the rest of the Southwest. The greatest differences were seen in Palm Springs, Bakersfield and Fresno. The smallest differences were seen in Sacramento.

On extreme heat days, the poorest California neighborhoods in each region were nearly 5 degrees hotter, on average, than the wealthiest neighborhoods. This compares to about 3 degrees difference in average temperatures for other Southwestern cities when comparing wealthier and poorer neighborhoods.

The largest differences occurred in the Inland Empire and Palm Springs areas in Riverside and San Bernardino County, where disparities in average temperatures between wealthier and poorer differed by more than 6 degrees.

"Programs to increase vegetation within disadvantaged neighborhoods and reduce or lighten pavements and rooftops could help reduce thermal disparities between neighborhoods of different socioeconomic characteristics," the authors said.

While neighborhoods populated by Blacks in Southern California showed some disparities in temperature -- about 1 to 2 degrees, when compared with white neighborhoods -- this difference was not statistically significant. Black populations throughout Southwestern metropolitan areas are relatively small, authors said, meaning that findings on this demographic dimension were less pronounced.

When falling in love, humans often pay attention to looks. Many non-human animals also choose a sexual partner based on appearance. Male birds may sport flashy feathers to attract females, lionesses prefer lions with thicker manes and colorful male guppies with large spots attract the most females. But bats are active in the dark. How do they attract mates? Mariana Muñoz-Romo, a senior Latin American postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and National Geographic explorer, pioneers research to understand the role of odors in bat mating behavior.

"Aside from their genitalia, most male and female bat species look identical at first glance. However, a detailed examination during mating season reveals odor-producing glands or structures that are only present in male bats. Long interested in this understudied sexual difference, and working with long-nosed bats, Leptonycteris curasoae, in Venezuela, Muñoz-Romo discovered that males exhibit an odorous dorsal patch in the mating season consisting of a mixture of saliva, feces, urine and/or semen that seems to attract reproductive females.

Later in Panama, Muñoz-Romo investigated the "perfumes" from smelly crusts that male fringe-lipped bats, Trachops cirrhosus, meticulously apply to their forearms during mating season. These studies deepened her interest in odor and its role in bat mating systems, and her conviction that odor may be bats' secret weapon to choosing a mate in the dark."

Studies across a range of mammalian species show that just by smelling a potential mate, an individual can assess its sex, age, sexual receptiveness, health, social status, group membership and identity. This is a whole lot of personal information in one sniff, suggesting that odor may be a more important factor for mate choice and reproduction.

Alongside STRI staff scientist Rachel Page and renowned Boston University bat ecologist, Thomas H. Kunz, Muñoz-Romo combed through all published articles on the topic. Together, they found reports of odor-producing structures in 121 bat species from 15 different bat families. This represents nearly 10% of all known bat species and over 70% of bat families. Odors come from very different parts of bats' bodies, from their heads and mouths to their wings or genitalia. Not only are chemical signals potent and effective for communication in dark conditions, they also do not impede the bats' ability to fly.

"We believe that these key factors--nocturnality and powered flight--combined with scent-producing glands common across mammals, promoted the evolution of a great diversity of the odorous displaying structures we find in bats," Muñoz-Romo said.

Although researchers know very little about these structures so far, the new review of the subject opens up promising new avenues for bat research. There are potentially many more odor-related structures waiting to be discovered.

"Future investigations should consider the importance of the timing of odor production and sexual behavior, because most of these traits are displayed during a specific and usually short time of the year--the mating season," Muñoz-Romo said. "Answering new questions about the nature and development of the odorous traits, as well as understanding which traits female bats prefer, are key to understanding why differences between males and females evolved. We also want to understand the chemistry of bat perfumes--what compounds make them attractive."

In another recent publication, Muñoz-Romo, Page and colleagues suggest that the size of the odorous crusts found on the forearms of male T. cirrhosus allow females to evaluate potential mates during the time of year when they were fertile.

"While differences between males and females (sexual dimorphism) in bats have long been overlooked, new tools are giving us an ever-expanding window into their previously cryptic social lives," Page said. "The patterns revealed here sharpen the focus of investigations going forward, in particular highlighting the importance of seasonally present odor-producing glands and soft tissues. With so many bat species still to be studied, it will be extremely exciting to see what lies on the horizon. We only wish that our dear friend and colleague, Tom Kunz, whose insight inspired this work, had lived to see the publication of this review."

Some songbirds are not dissuaded by constant, loud noise emitted by natural gas pipeline compressors and will establish nests nearby. The number of eggs they lay is unaffected by the din, but their reproductive success ultimately is diminished.

That's the conclusion of a team of Penn State researchers who conducted an innovative, elaborate study that included unceasing playback of recorded compressor noise, 80 new, never-before-used nest boxes occupied by Eastern bluebirds and tree swallows, and behavioral observations with video cameras placed within boxes.

Importantly, the birds did not preferentially select quiet boxes over noisy boxes, suggesting they do not recognize the reduction in habitat quality resulting from the noise," said study co-author Margaret Brittingham, professor of wildlife resources, College of Agricultural Sciences. "But both bluebirds and tree swallows nesting in noisy boxes spent less time incubating their eggs, had fewer eggs hatch and produced fewer young than their neighbors nesting in quiet boxes."

Natural gas is one of the most rapidly growing global energy sources, with continued expansion expected in shale gas development in particular. Compressor stations needed to pressurize gas and push it through pipelines to consumers -- often located in interior forests used by breeding birds -- may be depressing birds' reproduction in isolated forested areas.

"The loud, low-frequency noise emitted by natural gas compressor stations travels hundreds of yards into undisturbed areas," said co-author Julian Avery, associate research professor of wildlife ecology and conservation. "Because shale gas development often occurs in relatively undisturbed natural areas that provide important habitat for breeding birds, it is imperative that we develop plans to manage and mitigate noise."

The experiment, believed to be the first of its kind, was conducted at Penn State's Russell E. Larson Agricultural Research Center at Rock Springs, in central Pennsylvania. The study was unique because the researchers took extensive precautions to be sure they were assessing only the birds' reaction to the compressor noise and not other factors.

The design of the experiment allowed researchers to control for the confounding effects of both physical changes to the environment associated with compressor stations as well as the strong tendency for birds to return to the specific locations where they previously had bred.

Researchers established the 40 pairs of nest boxes to attract bluebirds and tree swallows to a site with no previous breeding population and immediately introduced shale gas compressor noise to half the boxes before birds returned to the region, while the other 40 boxes served as controls.

"We took a risk initiating the study -- we weren't sure these birds would find and occupy our boxes," Avery said. "We hoped that, 'if we build it, they will come.' Bluebirds likely had other nearby spots to nest, and the tree swallows were just returning from Central America. There was no guarantee they'd encounter our boxes."

The research was led by Danielle Williams, a master's degree student in wildlife and fisheries science, who currently is field coordinator for Purdue University's Hardwood Ecosystem Experiment.

Williams monitored video feeds from cameras placed within boxes to document changes in breeding behavior. She noted that there was no difference in clutch size -- eggs laid -- between noisy boxes and quiet boxes. Feeding behavior by the adults, known as provisioning, also was the same in both. However, in both species, she observed a reduction in incubation time, hatching success and fledging success -- the proportion of all eggs that fledged -- in noisy boxes compared to quiet boxes.

The findings, recently published in Ornithological Applications, demonstrate that compressor noise caused behavioral changes that led to reduced reproductive success for eastern bluebirds and tree swallows. The results indicate, the researchers said, that natural gas infrastructure can create an "equal-preference ecological trap," where birds do not distinguish between lower and higher quality territories, even when they incur reproductive costs.

Nest success -- the probability of fledging at least one young -- calculated from all nests that were initiated, was not affected by noise in either species studied, Brittingham pointed out.

"That suggests that noise did not increase rates of either depredation or abandonment but instead negatively impacted fitness through reduced hatching and fledging success," she said. "We never would have known that if we had not done this research."

Researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago have discovered a way to convert the methane in natural gas into liquid methanol at room temperature.

This discovery, reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could potentially provide a cleaner energy source for many of our everyday activities.

When burned, natural gas -- the fuel used to heat homes, cook food and generate electricity -- produces carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the U.S. consumed approximately 31 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in 2019, contributing roughly 1.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

A better way to use natural gas would be to convert it to methanol, a liquid fuel that burns more cleanly and can be used to produce gasoline and plastics. But converting the methane found in natural gas into methanol requires a lot of heat and pressure and generates a significant amount of carbon dioxide itself.

"Researchers have been interested in ways to convert methane to methanol at ambient temperatures to sidestep all the heat and pressure that is currently required in industrial processes to perform this conversion," said Meenesh Singh, assistant professor of chemical engineering at the UIC College of Engineering and corresponding author of the paper.

Methanol also is thought to be the "fuel in the future," driving a "methanol economy" where it replaces fossil fuels in transportation, energy storage and as the dominant precursor material for synthetic chemicals and other products. Methanol is currently used in fuel cell technology that powers some city buses and other vehicles. Its lower emission potentials and higher volumetric energy density make it an attractive alternative to fossil fuels, Singh said.

"Besides being a cleaner-burning fuel, methane can also be stored safely in regular containers, unlike natural gas, which has to be stored under pressure and which is much more expensive," Singh said.

High amounts of heat and pressure are required to break the hydrocarbon bonds in methane gas, the first step in producing methanol. But Singh and UIC graduate student Aditya Prajapati have identified a catalyst material that helps bring down the energy needed to break these bonds so that the reaction can take place at room temperature.

"We have been able to reduce the temperature of the industrial process from more than 200 degrees Celsius to room temperature, which is around 20 degrees Celsius," Prajapati said.

Their catalyst is composed of titanium and copper. The catalyst, together with a small amount of electricity, facilitates the breaking of the hydrocarbon bonds of methane and the formation of methanol. The process uses much less energy than traditional methods, and because it doesn't require machinery to produce high pressure and heat, it can be set up quickly and inexpensively.

"Our process doesn't need to be centralized," Singh said. "It can be implemented in a space as small as a van and is portable for distributed utilization of natural gas and manufacturing of methanol."

Singh and colleagues have filed a provisional patent for the process and expect that it could convert a few liters of methanol a day. The patent is being managed through the UIC Office of Technology Management.

A POSTECH-KAIST joint research team has successfully developed a technique to reach near-unity efficiency of SHEL by using an artificially-designed metasurface.

Professor Junsuk Rho of POSTECH's departments of mechanical engineering and chemical engineering, and Ph.D. candidate Minkyung Kim and Dr. Dasol Lee of Department of Mechanical Engineering in collaboration with Professor Bumki Min and Hyukjoon Cho of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at KAIST have together proposed a technique to enhance the SHEL with near 100% efficiency using an anisotropic metasurface. For this, the joint research team designed a metasurface that transmits most light of one polarization and reflects the light from the other, verifying that the SHEL occurs in high-frequency region. These research findings were recently published in the February issue of Laser and Photonics Reviews, an authoritative journal in optics.

The spin hall effect of light (SHEL) refers to a transverse and spin-dependent shift of light to the plane of incidence when it is reflected or refracted at an optical interface. When amplified, it can shift light that is several times or tens of times greater than its wavelength.

Previous studies of enhancing the SHEL have involved greater light movement with little consideration for efficiency. Since enhancing the SHEL produces extremely low efficiency, studies on achieving a large SHEL and high efficiency simultaneously have never been reported.

To this, the joint research team used an anisotropic metasurface to enhance the SHEL. It was designed to enable high SHEL by transmitting most of the light from one polarization while reflecting the light from the other. By measuring the transmission of metasurface in the high-frequency region - such as microwaves - and verifying the polarization state of the transmitted light, the researchers verified the occurrence of SHEL reaching 100% efficiency.

"The very mechanisms that enhance the SHEL in most previous studies in fact lowered its efficiency," remarked Professor Junsuk Rho, the corresponding author who led the study. "This research is significant in that it is the first study to propose a method to calculate the efficiency of the SHEL, and to increase its efficiency and enhance the SHEL simultaneously." He added, "The SHEL is applicable in microscopic optical devices, such as beam splitters, filters and switches, and this study will improve their effectiveness."

A study published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry has found long-term impacts of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the northern Gulf of Mexico on bottlenose dolphins' immune function.

Bottlenose dolphins from an area that received prolonged and heavy oiling were temporarily captured, sampled, and released as part of health assessment programs. The animals were compared with dolphins from an area where no oil was observed.

Investigators documented immunological alterations in bottlenose dolphins tested up to a decade following the oil spill that were similar in nature to those immediately following the spill. The effects were seen even in dolphins born after the spill. The nature of the immunological effects observed in dolphins were also similar to those in mice experimentally exposed to oil in the lab.

The findings suggest that there are long-term consequences of oil exposure on the mammalian immune system, with possible multigenerational effects.

"The parallel between findings in dolphins exposed following the Deepwater Horizon spill and laboratory mice experimentally exposed to oil was impressive and really helped build the weight of evidence between oil exposure and specific effects on the immune system," said corresponding author Sylvain De Guise, PhD, of the University of Connecticut. "However, the long-term effects and potential for multigenerational effects raise significant concerns for the recovery of dolphin populations following the spill," he added.

A study of over 1,700 U.S. young people exposed to four major hurricanes found that just a few of them reported chronic stress, and the trajectories among most youth reflected recovery or low-decreasing post-traumatic stress (PTS) symptoms, according to research recently published in JAMA Network Open.

Titled "Trajectories of Post-traumatic Stress in Youths After Natural Disasters," the inquiry, conducted from August 2017 to August 2020, combined data from four studies of youths ages six to 16 who attended schools near the respective destructive paths of Hurricanes Andrew (1992), Charley (2004), Ike (2005) and Katrina (2008), from three to 26 months following the disasters. Fifty-four percent of the subjects were female, and 46 percent identified as White non-Hispanic.

Utilizing the Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Reaction Indexes developed by the University of California, Los Angeles to assess PTS, and latent class growth analyses to evaluate the participants' symptom trajectories and associated factors, 10 percent registered as "chronic," while 23 percent were considered "recovery," 33 percent were classified as "moderate-stable," and 34 percent were "low-decreasing." Female and younger youths among the subjects tended to experience more severe PTS symptom trajectories.

The findings also suggest that youth with "chronic" or "moderate-stable" trajectories may benefit from post-disaster intervention.

"These findings may guide policy makers to effectively implement `stepped care' after a disaster, where the most effective yet least resourced intensive treatment is delivered to youths first, and escalating services are only implemented as clinically required," said lead author Betty S. Lai, Ph.D., the Buehler Sesquicentennial Assistant Professor Chair in the Department of Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology at Boston College's Lynch School of Education and Human Development. "The results also highlight the need for health surveillance systems after disasters, since many youths reported elevated PTS symptoms."

Ancient alchemists dreamed of transforming base materials like lead into gold and other valuable commodities. While such efforts generally came to naught, researchers today are having some success in extracting a variety of useful products like aviation fuels, lubricants, solvents, food additives and plastics from organic waste.

The trick is accomplished with the aid of specialized bacteria, whose metabolic activities can convert simpler chemicals into useful products through a microbial growth process knows as chain elongation.

Anca Delgado, a researcher in the Biodesign Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology at Arizona State University, has been exploring the phenomenon. In a new study, she describes for the first time how the chain elongation processes are carried out by microorganisms under normal conditions in soil.

The work promises to shed new light on these poorly understood processes in nature, allowing researchers to better leverage them to convert organic sources like food waste into valuable products. Such techniques offer a double benefit to society, minimizing or eliminating environmental waste/contaminants while producing biochemicals or biofuels and other important resources, through green chemistry. The work will also help researchers expand their knowledge of microbial ecology.

"We observed that different soil types sampled from 1.5 m or less below ground surface harbor a readily active potential for chain elongation of acetate and ethanol," Delgado says. " When fed acetate and ethanol, soil microcosms produced butyrate and hexanoate in just a few days and chain elongation became the main metabolism occurring in these samples."

Delgado is joined by ASU colleagues Sayalee Joshi, Aide Robles, and Samuel Aguiar.

Their research findings appear in the current issue of the International Society of Microbial Ecology (ISME) journal.

Energy from waste

The idea of converting organic residual streams like food waste to fuels and useful compounds has been steadily gaining ground, driven by advancing technologies as well as the rapidly growing global need for clean energy sources and pollution reduction. Such processes can help society form so-called circular economies, in which unwanted waste streams are continually converted into energy sources and other useful commodities.

Organic waste sources hold enormous potential as an alternative resource for producing high-value fuels and chemicals because they are renewable and because they do not compete with the human food chain, (as some existing biofuels like corn ethanol do).

One source for these useful transformations is organic food waste, a staggering amount of which is produced annually. Driven by rising global populations, the accumulation of food waste has become a critical problem, due to associated health and environmental hazards.

Food waste is discharged from a variety of sources, including food processing industries, households, and the hospitality sector. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture organization, a staggering 1.3 billion tons of food are lost to the food chain, and the amount is on a rapid rise.

From environmental threat to opportunity

In addition to the squandering of food and land resources, food waste contributes a hefty burden to the environment in terms of carbon footprint, increasing greenhouse gas emissions and liberating an estimated 3.3 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per year. Researchers hope to convert these waste residues into useful products and purify them in an efficient manner.

One of the most innovative and eco-friendly means of dealing with all of this organic waste is through anaerobic digestion, which also holds the promise of expanding the world's energy supply. A promising emergent technology employing anaerobic digestion is known as microbial chain elongation, a metabolic process used by anaerobic microorganisms to grow and acquire energy. They do this by combining carboxylate chemicals like acetate (C2), with more reduced compounds, such as ethanol (C2), to produce longer-chain carboxylates (typically C4-C8).

This biotechnological process converts volatile fatty acids (VFAs) and an electron donor, typically, ethanol, into more valuable medium chain fatty acids (MCFAs), which are the precursors needed to produce biofuels and other useful chemicals. Initial waste sources are processed through chain-elongation, which involves the cyclic addition of carbon units, thereby converting municipal solid waste, agriculture waste, syngas, etc., into the high-value, medium-chain carboxylates like hexanoate (C6) and octanoate (C8).

The conversion of VFAs into MCFAs with ethanol as electron donor is accomplished by chain elongating microorganisms, particularly, a bacterium known as Clostridium kluyveri. C. kluyveri (and closely related bacterial strains) accomplish their chain-elongation feats through a process known as the reverse β-oxidative pathway. As the name suggests, this pathway is the opposite of metabolic pathway organisms use to break down fatty acids derived from foods.

In recent years, researchers have explored β-oxidation pathways as well as developing the means to reverse these pathways in order to produce chemicals and polymer building blocks, using industrially relevant microorganisms.

Reactions under our feet

Chain elongation has hence proven an effective means of producing valuable chemicals in laboratory bioreactors, though the process is presumed to occur naturally in soils as well. It turns out that anaerobic soils and sediments are often rich in the same kinds of biodegradable organic compounds found in municipal or agriculture waste streams and therefore, a natural source of chain elongation.

Using soil samples from four various US locations, the current study examines the extent of natural chain elongation and how these processes vary according to the particular biogeochemical characteristics of soil composition. The research was designed to gauge the prevalence of chain elongation in anaerobic soil microorganisms and its possible role in microbial ecology.

The results demonstrate the potential for chain elongation activities involving acetate and ethanol, which are typical metabolites found in soils as a result of organic compound fermentation. The study measured high enrichment rates in microorganisms similar to C. kluyveri under chain elongating conditions, which were found to vary with soil type.

The findings shed new light on this intriguing aspect of microbial ecology and may provide helpful clues for future efforts using microorganisms to process waste streams into a range of beneficial chemicals and other products.

As Delgado notes, "on the fundamental side, results from this study are paving the way for investigations on the activity of chain elongation in situ. On the biotechnology side, this work shows that soils can be excellent sources of chain-elongating microorganisms for bioreactors focused on production of the specialty chemicals, hexanoate and octanoate."

A short-lived resurgence in the emission of ozone depleting pollutants in eastern China will not significantly delay the recovery of Earth's protective "sunscreen" layer, according to new research published Feb. 10 in Nature.

Stratospheric ozone, also known as Earth's ozone layer, helps shield us from the Sun's harmful Ultraviolet (UV) rays. Compounds like CFC-11 (Trichlorofluoromethane, also known as Freon-11), a chemical once considered safe and widely used as a refrigerant and in the production of insulation for buildings, rise to the stratosphere after emission on Earth's surface. Once in the atmosphere, CFC's are broken down by the UV light and result in the destruction of ozone molecules, both reducing stratospheric ozone concentrations globally and contributing to a "hole" in the layer that appears over Antarctica in the spring.

n 1987, the Montreal Protocol - an international treaty enacted to protect the ozone layer from additional degradation - banned new production and trade of ozone depleting substances like CFC-11. One hundred ninety-eight nations have since signed on to the agreement.

After production ceased, scientists still expected CFC-11 to continue leaking over the years from existing products, but at a gradually declining rate. Because of this, the gas is among those monitored at the global scale by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s Global Monitoring Division and the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE) - a network of monitoring stations funded by NASA and several environmental agencies, and headed by the Center for Global Change Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography.

In 2018, NOAA first reported a smaller decrease in the decline of atmospheric CFC-11 than expected. The numbers didn't align with trajectories based on CFC-11's production ban, hinting that something had changed. "The slow-down in the rate of decline indicated that somebody was emitting again, or in larger quantities than we were expecting, we just didn't know where," says Matt Rigby, University of Bristol (UK) scientist and one of the lead authors of the new study.

It was the AGAGE network that helped track down the origins of much of the new emission of CFC-11 thanks to its geographic distribution. Two of its stations, the South Korean Gosan AGAGE station, run by Kyungpook National University in South Korea, and the AGAGE-affiliated station on Hateruma Island in Japan, run by Japan's National Institute of Environmental Studies, were both positioned close enough to the source for researchers to track much of the new emissions back to their source: eastern China.

"This is very much like detective work," said Qing Liang, a research scientist at NASA Goddard's Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. and co-author of the study. "We figured out there was a problem, then we tracked down where the problem was regionally, and it seems that the actions taken in China, and perhaps elsewhere, have resulted in a big drop in the unexpected emissions [since 2018]."

Due in large part to effective monitoring, and subsequent reaction to the 2018 report, data and analysis in these two papers (published in February 2021) suggest that both the renewed eastern Chinese and overall global emissions of CFC-11 after mandated global phase out in 2010, have returned to previous levels.

Not only is this important for the ozone layer's recovery, but CFC-11 also impacts climate as a potent greenhouse gas. The observed levels of increased emission were comparable to the carbon dioxide emissions of a city roughly the size of London. In other words, closing off CFC-11 emissions has an additional climate benefit similar to that of shutting off a megacity.

Despite the monitoring success story, some emissions are still unaccounted for - and scientists have been unable to pinpoint where they are coming from due to current limitations of the monitoring network.

"The one critical piece of information we need is atmospheric observations," said Liang. "That's the reason why it is really important for NASA and NOAA, together with their international partners, to continue making measurements of these gases." Monitoring networks like the AGAGE stations are a valuable tool for understanding the role atmospheric chemistry plays in our changing climate.

Though these new CFC-11 emissions were identified relatively quickly, they have the potential to delay ozone layer recovery, especially if left unchecked, so a timely response is paramount.

"This was evidence for probably the biggest challenge that the Montreal Protocol has ever faced," said Rigby, "but I think it's been heartening to see how closely the science has been listened to by the parties of the Montreal Protocol, and then how rapidly the science has been acted on as well; All this has happened over the space of essentially two years, which is pretty incredible."

DURHAM, N.C. -- A new pair of studies from a Duke research team's long-term work in New Zealand make the case that mental health struggles in early life can lead to poorer physical health and advanced aging in adulthood.

But because mental health problems peak early in life and can be identified, the researchers say that more investment in prompt mental health care could be used to prevent later diseases and lower societal healthcare costs.

"The same people who experience psychiatric conditions when they are young go on to experience excess age-related physical diseases and neurodegenerative diseases when they are older adults," explained Terrie Moffitt, the Nannerl O. Keohane professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke, who is the senior author on both studies.

The findings in a paper appearing Feb. 17 in JAMA Psychiatry come from the long-term Dunedin Study, which has tested and monitored the health and wellbeing of a thousand New Zealanders born in 1972 and '73 from their birth to past age 45.

In middle age, the study participants who had a history of youthful psychopathology were aging at a faster pace, had declines in sensory, motor and cognitive functions, and were rated as looking older than their peers. This pattern held even after the data were controlled for health factors such as overweight, smoking, medications and prior physical disease. Their young mental health issues included mainly anxiety, depression, and substance abuse, but also schizophrenia.

"You can identify the people at risk for physical illnesses much earlier in life," said Jasmin Wertz, a postdoctoral researcher at Duke who led the study. "If you can improve their mental health in childhood and adolescence, it's possible that you might intervene to improve their later physical health and aging."

A related study by the same team that appeared in JAMA Network Open in January used a different approach and looked at 30 years of hospital records for 2.3 million New Zealanders aged 10 to 60 from 1988 to 2018. It also found a strong connection between early-life mental health diagnoses and later-life medical and neurological illnesses.

That analysis, led by former Duke postdoctoral researcher Leah Richmond-Rakerd, showed that young individuals with mental disorders were more likely to develop subsequent physical diseases and to die earlier than people without mental disorders. People with mental illnesses experienced more hospitalizations for physical conditions, spent more time in hospitals and accumulated more healthcare costs over the subsequent 30 years.

"Our healthcare system often divides treatment between the brain and the body, but integrating the two could benefit population health," said Richmond-Rakerd, who is now an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.

"Investing more resources in treating young people's mental-health problems is a window of opportunity to prevent future physical diseases in older adults," Moffitt said. "Young people with mental health problems go on to become very costly medical patients in later life."

In a 2019 commentary for JAMA Psychiatry, Moffitt and her research partner Avshalom Caspi, the Edward M. Arnett professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke, made the argument that mental health providers have an opportunity to forestall later health problems and other social costs by intervening in the lives of younger people. Their body of work is showing that mental disorders can be reliably predicted from childhood risk factors such as poverty, maltreatment, low IQ, poor self-control and family mental health issues. And because populations in the developed world are becoming more dominated by older people, the time to make those investments in prevention is now, they said.

Children are protected from severe COVID-19 because their innate immune system is quick to attack the virus, a new study has found.

The research led by the Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI) and published in Nature Communications, found that specialised cells in a child's immune system rapidly target the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2).

MCRI's Dr Melanie Neeland said the reasons why children have mild COVID-19 disease compared to adults, and the immune mechanisms underpinning this protection, were unknown until this study.

"Children are less likely to become infected with the virus and up to a third are asymptomatic, which is strikingly different to the higher prevalence and severity observed in children for most other respiratory viruses," she said.

"Understanding the underlying age-related differences in the severity of COVID-19 will provide important insights and opportunities for prevention and treatment, both for COVID-19 and possible future pandemics."

The study involved an analysis of blood samples from 48 children and 70 adults across 28 Melbourne households infected with, or exposed to, the new coronavirus. Immune responses were monitored during the acute phase of infection and up to two months afterwards.

Francesca Orsini and Alessandro Bartesaghi took part in the study along with their two daughters, Beatrice and Camilla, after all tested positive to COVID-19.

Both daughters, aged six and two, only had a mild runny nose but Francesca and Alessandro had extreme fatigue, headaches, muscle pain and loss of appetite and sense of taste. It took Francesca and Alessandro at least a fortnight to fully recover.

Dr Neeland said the study showed that children with COVID-19 have a more robust innate immune response to the virus compared to adults.

"Coronavirus infection in children was characterised by activation of neutrophils, the specialised white blood cell that helps heal damaged tissues and resolves infections, and a reduction in first-responder immune cells such as monocytes, dendritic cells and natural killer cells from the blood," she said. "This suggests these infection-fighting immune cells are migrating to infection sites, quickly clearing the virus before it has a chance to really take hold."

"This shows that the innate immune system, our first line of defence against germs, is crucial to prevent severe COVID-19 in children. Importantly, this immune reaction was not replicated among adults in the study."

But Dr Neeland said children and adults who were exposed to, but tested negative for the coronavirus also had altered immune responses.

"Both kids and adults had increased neutrophil numbers, out to seven weeks after exposure to the virus, which could have provided a level of protection from disease," she said.

The study confirms previous MCRI research that found three children in a Melbourne family developed a similar immune response after prolonged exposure to the coronavirus from their parents.

The research stated although the children had been infected with the coronavirus, they were able to mount an immune response which was highly effective in stopping the virus from replicating, meaning they never returned a positive test.

With every passing day, human technology becomes more refined and we become slightly better equipped to look deeper into biological processes and molecular and cellular structures, thereby gaining greater understanding of mechanisms underlying diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer's, and others.

Today, nanoimaging, one such cutting-edge technology, is widely used to structurally characterize subcellular components and cellular molecules such as cholesterol and fatty acids. But it is not without its limitations, as Professor Dae Won Moon of Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Technology (DGIST), Korea, lead scientist in a recent groundbreaking study advancing the field, explains: "Most advanced nanoimaging techniques use accelerated electron or ion beams in ultra-high-vacuum environments. To introduce cells into such an environment, one must chemically fix and physically freeze or dry them. But such processes deteriorate the cells' original molecular composition and distribution."

Prof. Moon and his team wanted to find a way to avoid this deterioration. "We wanted to apply advanced nanoimaging techniques in ultra-high-vacuum environments to living cells in solution without any chemical and physical treatment, not even fluorescence staining, to obtain intrinsic biomolecular information that is impossible to obtain using conventional bioimaging techniques," Dr. Heejin Lim, a key member of the research team, explains. Their novel solution is published in Nature Methods.

Their technique involves placing wet cells on a collagen-coated wet substrate with microholes, which in turn is on top of a cell culture medium reservoir. The cells are then covered with a single layer of graphene. It is the graphene that is expected to protect the cells from desiccation and cell membranes from degradation.

Through optical microscopy, the scientists confirmed that, when prepared this way, the cells remain viable and alive up to ten minutes after placing in an ultra-high-vacuum environment. The scientists also performed nanoimaging, specifically, secondary ion mass spectrometry imaging, in this environment for up to 30 mins. The images they captured within the first ten minutes paint a highly detailed (submicrometer) picture of the true intrinsic distribution of lipids in their native states in the cell membranes; for this duration, the membranes underwent no significant distortion.

With this method too, however, a cascade of ion beam collisions at a point on the graphene film can create a big enough hole for some of the lipid particles to escape. But while this degradation to the cell membrane does occur, it is not significant within the ten-minute window and there is no solution leakage. Further, the graphene molecules react with water molecules to self-repair. So, overall, this is a great way to learn about cell membrane molecules in their native state in high resolution.

"I imagine that our innovative technique can be widely used by many biomedical imaging laboratories for more reliable bioanalyses of cells and eventually for overcoming complex diseases," says Prof. Moon.

Will this innovation become the norm? Only time will tell!

A team of MedUni Vienna researchers led by Johannes A. Schmid at the Center for Physiology and Pharmacology, Institute of Vascular Biology and Thrombosis Research, has managed to identify a previously unknown molecular connection between an inflammatory signalling molecule and one of the main oncogenes. The study has been published in the leading journal "Molecular Cancer".

Johannes A. Schmid's working group at the Center for Physiology and Pharmacology, Institute of Vascular Biology and Thrombosis Research, already has many years' experience in the molecular and cellular aspects of inflammatory processes and is investigating what role these processes play in the development of cancer, as well as cardiovascular diseases. Based on structural similarities between key inflammatory enzymes, the so-called I-kappa B kinases (IKKs), and c-Myc, a protein that is present in elevated quantities in many forms of cancer, the researchers suspected that there might be a direct interaction between these molecules. They could now confirm this interaction using a special microscopic technique.

"We were able to show that the inflammatory enzymes attach phosphates at a very specific site of the c-Myc protein, causing a slower degradation of the molecule, and a subsequent accumulation in the cells leading to a higher activity," explains Schmid. "Cells that contain a c-Myc variant that imitates this phosphorylation are characterised by a higher rate of cell division and greater resistance to chemotherapeutics."

Using CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing, the lead author of the study, Bernhard Moser, was able to eliminate both c-Myc and the inflammatory enzymes IKK-alpha and IKK-beta from prostate cancer cells, thereby demonstrating, on a genetic basis, that the interaction between IKK-alpha and c-Myc is crucial. Second author Bernhard Hochreiter was able to confirm the correlation between these two proteins in a prostate-cancer mouse model. Finally, bioinformatics analyses were performed, showing that this correlation can also be observed in different types of human cancer.

Schmid summarises as follows: "The important point about this study is that, we found a previously undiscovered molecular mechanism that links a central inflammatory signalling molecule with cancer development, thereby adding another specific aspect to previously identified links between inflammation and cancer. This finding indicates that drugs that inhibit this inflammatory enzyme could be used therapeutically in certain types of cancer."

The Silk Road was the most elaborate network of trade routes in the ancient world, linking ancient populations in East Asia to those in southwest Asia, via Central Asia. These trade routes fostered the spread of ideas, religions, and technologies over the past 2,000 years. Before the establishment of organized exchange, starting around the time of the Chinese Han Dynasty (2,223 years ago), a process of trans-Eurasian exchange was already underway through the river valleys and oases of Central Asia. The establishment of populations in the oases of the Taklimakan Desert in Xinjiang, China, was a major factor facilitating this trans-Eurasian exchange. However, archaeological evidence for human occupation in these arid regions as well as long-distance diffusion of cultural material is largely lacking prior to the early fourth millennium BP. Paleoecologists have long been aware of the potential for regional climatic fluctuations in Arid Central Asia (ACA), and the shifting oases or river ways of the desert zone can influence cultural diffusion along the pre-Silk Road.

In this publication, a team of paleoclimatologists provides evidence suggesting that an extended dry period may have made it more difficult to traverse these deserts for a 640-year period in prehistory. The megadrought in ACA appears to have occurred during 5820-5180 BP, and was likely tied into a northward shift in the prevailing air masses. The dearth of archaeological evidence for sedentary human occupation in the region during this drought period suggests that the climatic conditions may have hindered human movement and effectively reduced or blocked overland travel between eastern and western Central Asia. The agricultural regions of the ancient world were isolated from each other by the high peaks of the Himalaya, but exceptionally arid climatic conditions in Central Asia may have further contributed to that cultural isolation.

The results of this international research endeavor, led by Dr. Liangcheng Tan, a professor from The Belt & Road center of the Institute of Earth Environment, through the Chinese Academy of Sciences, were recently published in Science Bulletin as a cover paper. The article is titled "Megadrought and cultural exchange along the proto-Silk Road". The research team includes collaborations with 15 scientific institutions and universities from China, the United States, Kyrgyzstan, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Archeological studies indicate that trans-Eurasian exchange was occurring as early as the terminal 5th millennium BP, but only started in earnest during the 4th millennium BP. This exchange is marked by the dispersal of wheat, barley, sheep, goats, and cattle from West Asia into northern China. Likewise, East Asian broomcorn and foxtail millet dispersed from northern China into West Asia, and eventually on to Europe. Some scholars have referred to this process as food globalization in prehistory. The traditional narrative suggest that early movements of humans crossed the northern Eurasian steppe. However, increasingly archaeologists are recognizing that the main routes of cultural dispersal in prehistory followed the same routes as the historic Silk Road. These river valleys and desert oases fostered connections between intensive agricultural regions in prehistory.

This international team worked in collaboration with officials in Kyrgyzstan to collect stalagmites from Talisman Cave. The cave is located in the southeastern Fergana Valley, near the crossroads of the historic Silk Road. Stalagmites are cave formations that gradually accumulate over thousands of years as water drips from the cave roof and calcium precipitates out of it. These features trap in their cores a highly detailed climatic record, unlike what can be pieced together through pollen or paleolake shore studies. The researchers on this project used oxygen and carbon isotopes, as well as trace element records to track precipitation changes through time. They also used a radiometric U-Th dating techniques on the two stalagmites to reveal precipitation (rainfall and snowfall) history in ACA over the past 7,800 years. The average dating uncertainty of this method is about 6‰, and average temporal resolution of the proxies is roughly 3 years. This nuanced level of precision allows for a high-resolution precipitation record.

The climatic record illustrated frequent short-duration shifts in the precipitation regimes for this intercontinental region. The most remarkable feature of the precipitation record was a prolonged period of aridity or a megadrought lasting 640 years, between 5820 and 5180 BP. The scale of the megadrought is unlike any of the other environmental shifts that the team noted for the last 7,800 years. This period of aridity would have had significant consequences in the local environment, especially in the ephemeral desert oases. For example, the level of Lake Balkhash was at least 20 meters lower during the peak of the megadrought than at present. The scientists suggest that the megadrought resulted from a northward shift of the westerly jet. As explained by Dr. Liangcheng Tan, "the northward shift of the westerly jet could have reduced the frequency and intensity of Mediterranean storms, decreasing precipitation in the Mediterranean and parts of southwest Asia, and reducing the moisture transfer to Arid Central Asia". In addition, it strengthened and shifted the westerlies northward, decreasing the sea surface temperature of the North Atlantic, and reducing the evaporated moisture transported from the North Atlantic to ACA. The two processes could have worked together and amplified the regional effects of the other, ultimately resulting in the megadrought.

The researchers further collected up-to-date archaeological records from across Eurasia over the past 10,000 years, and found a synchronous shift in the timing of the dispersal of cultural traits across East and West Asia. Agropastoral groups did not begin to expand into ACA until after the megadrought. "No society could overcome the severity of these conditions over such a long period and the archaeological record of the area falls largely silent during this period. This suggests societies in Arid Central Asia had to abandon life around oases and relocate to areas with mountains and run-off to the north and south for reliable supplies of water", said by Prof. John Dodson from University of Wollongong. The megadrought would have hindered human movement and effectively reduced or blocked overland travel between eastern and western Central Asia along the pre-Silk Road. Instead, it may have pushed human movements further north into the Eurasian Steppe or forest steppe, further resulting in the first trans-Eurasian movements of people along the southern Siberia Steppe during the 5th millennium BP.

After the megadrought, precipitation gradually increased and the oases recovered, allowing for a demographic expansion and the beginning of cultural dispersal across ACA. Meanwhile, the development of agricultural and herding techniques, the domestication of the horse and eventually the camel further increased the mobility of agropastoral groups, which facilitated the interconnection of East and West Asian peoples by the 4th millennium BP.

Dr. Guanghui Dong of Lanzhou University, one of the paper's coauthors, think this study reveals the underlying mechanism of the spatial-temporal transformation of the Bronze Age trans-Eurasian exchange from a climatic and environmental aspect, and provides support for a better understanding of the formation of the prehistoric Silk Road. "The unusual precipitation record identified in this study could also contribute to a better understanding of the centennial- to decadal-scale hydroclimate changes in ACA, as well as predicting the future precipitation trends in this ecologically vulnerable region", said Dr. Tan.

The unprecedented and deadly blazes that engulfed the American West in 2020 attest to the increasing number, size and severity of wildfires in the region. And while scientists predict the climate crisis will exacerbate this situation, there's still much discussion around its contributing factors.

With this in mind, scientists at five western universities, including UC Santa Barbara, investigated the effects of human-driven climate change and more than a century of fire suppression, which has produced dense forests primed to burn. Their research, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, confirms the importance of both factors in driving wildfires, but revealed that their influence varies, even within the same region of the Western U.S.

"We wanted to know how climate change and fire suppression, each in different ways, can influence fire regimes," said coauthor Naomi Tague, a professor of ecohydrology and ecoinformatics at UCSB's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management.

The scientists, led by Assistant Professor Erin Hanan at the University of Nevada, integrated three research methods to tackle these questions. They employed remote sensing data to characterize past fires. They harnessed climate models to determine the role climate change has played in local meteorological patterns, including temperature, rainfall and humidity. And they used an earth-system model to simulate how climate, water, vegetation and wildfire interact over space and time.

The scientists drew on climate records developed through a National Science Foundation-funded initiative called FireEarth and a watershed model called RHESSys-Fire that originated in the Tague Team Lab at UC Santa Barbara. Funding from another NSF initiative had enabled Tague's lab to incorporate advances to this model that represent the climate impacts on fire, as well as hydrology and vegetation growth. The authors applied these techniques to data gathered across complex terrain in two mixed-conifer watersheds in the Idaho Batholith and the Central Rocky Mountains.

The results were clear, but far from straightforward. "For some locations, we found that climate change increased fire activity," said Tague, who led the SERI-Fire initiative, "but surprisingly, in other locations, climate change actually decreased fire activity."

The team found that climate change increased burn probability and led to larger, more frequent fires in wetter areas while doing the opposite in more arid locations. In areas of intermediate soil moisture, the effects of climate change and fire suppression varied in response to local trade-offs between flammability and fuel loading.

The scientists were surprised that climate change could decrease the severity of fires under certain conditions, but Tague offers an explanation. "Climate change can reduce the growth and development of fuels," she said, "particularly in more arid sites."

These are crucial insights in our efforts to understand and manage wildfires. "This paper presents one of the first wildfire attribution studies at the scale of actionable management," said lead author Erin Hanan, "and shows that local responses to climate change and fire suppression can be highly variable even within individual watersheds."

"This study is really the first to directly compare the independent effects of climate change versus fire suppression, which you can only do using dynamic models," added UC Merced Assistant Professor Crystal Kolden, who led the FireEarth initiative. "We were actually surprised that the climate change signal was so clear; that's kind of rare. And even though our study was limited to Idaho, the forest types and climate we modeled are found throughout the western U.S., so they are good analogs for many other watersheds."

In addition to illuminating the roles of major wildfire factors, the research also boosts methodology. "This paper moves fire modeling and prediction forward by looking inside watersheds and disentangling the many factors that influence how fire regimes will evolve in the coming decades," said Tague.

While climate change remains a major component -- increasing the frequency and intensity of large wildfires across the globe -- there are many regions where past suppression efforts still play an important role. Forest-density reduction is often a favored approach in regions where decades of fire suppression have significantly increased fuel loads. However, density reductions sometimes have unintended consequences, as Tague and her colleagues detailed in a paper recently published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. Under certain conditions, this practice can encourage vegetation growth, which can lead to greater water use by plants and potentially increasing fire risks.

Because fuel management often occurs at fine scales, spatially explicit models are needed to project how different areas within watersheds will respond to fire suppression or fuel treatments under the shifting conditions brought about by climate change.

"Our results tell us that a one-size-fits-all approach to fuel treatment and fire management is unlikely to work," Tague said. "Debates over what causes fire activity, and what good treatment options might be, must always take where you are into account."