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EVANSTON, Ill.-- Packing for outer space? Here's one thing you won't want to forget.

Northwestern University researchers have synthesized a new form of melanin enriched with selenium. Called selenomelanin, this new biomaterial shows extraordinary promise as a shield for human tissue against harmful radiation.

"Given the increased interest in space travel, and the general need for lightweight, multifunctional and radioprotective biomaterials, we've become excited about the potential of melanin," said Northwestern's Nathan Gianneschi, who led the research. "It occurred to our postdoctoral fellow Wei Cao that melanin containing selenium would offer better protection than other forms of melanin. That brought up the intriguing possibility that this as-yet undiscovered melanin may very well exist in nature, being used in this way. So we skipped the discovery part and decided to make it ourselves."

The research will be published online on Wednesday, July 8 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, ahead of publication in the July print edition.

Gianneschi is the Jacob and Rosalind Cohn Professor of Chemistry in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and associate director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology. Cao is the paper's first author.

Melanin is found in most organisms across the plant and animal kingdoms, as well as in bacteria and fungi. Though best known for pigmentation, melanin also provides valuable protection from radiation. Five kinds of melanin have been observed in nature, with pheomelanin (the pigment in red hair) shown to absorb X-rays more efficiently than the more common eumelanin (black and brown pigments in dark hair).

Unwanted exposure to radiation occurs during many common activities, from air travel to X-ray diagnosis and clinical radiation therapy. It's an even greater consideration in extreme cases like a nuclear reactor malfunction or human space travel. NASA's landmark "Twins Study" showed damage to astronaut Scott Kelly's DNA from his year in orbit. An astronaut on a Mars mission could receive up to 700 times more radiation than on Earth.

Compared to the weight and bulk of traditional radioprotective materials like lead, melanin it is lighter and more flexible in how it can be used. Melanin samples are currently in orbit at the International Space Station, being studied by another research team for the material's response to radiation exposure. Recent studies have focused on pheomelanin, which contains sulfur, as the best candidate for that purpose.

Gianneschi's team hypothesized, however, that a new kind of melanin -- enriched with selenium instead of sulfur -- would provide better protection against X-rays. Selenium is an essential micronutrient that plays an important role in cancer prevention, and previous research reports that selenium compounds can protect animals against radiation. These compounds are found in normal human proteins, but have not been associated with melanin in nature before.

Gianneschi's team synthesized the new biomaterial, which they called "selenomelanin," and used it to treat living cells. For comparison, they also prepared cells treated with synthetic pheomelanin and eumelanin, as well as cells with no protective melanin.

After receiving a dose of radiation that would be lethal to a human being, only the cells treated with selenomelanin still exhibited a normal cell cycle.

"Our results demonstrated that selenomelanin offers superior protection from radiation," Gianneschi said. "We also found that it was easier to synthesize selenomelanin than pheomelanin, and what we created was closer than synthetic pheomelanin to the melanin found in nature."

Further testing with bacteria showed that selenomelanin can be biosynthesized, meaning that live cells fed with appropriate nutrients can then produce selenomelanin on their own -- and retain its radioprotective properties. In fact, although the researchers synthesized selenomelanin in their lab, they believe it may already be present in nature.

"With an abundant source of selenium in the environment, some organisms may have been able to adapt to extreme circumstances such radiation through the beneficial effects of selenomelanin," Gianneschi said.

"Our work points to the possibility that melanin may act as a repository for selenium, helping ensure that organisms benefit from it," said Cao. "Selenomelanin may play an important role in how selenium is metabolized and distributed biologically. It's an area for further investigation."

Gianneschi and his team envision that this new biomaterial could be applied to a person's skin, like a melanin-based sunscreen. It could also be used as a protective film to shield materials from radiation while in transit.

Science is collaborative by nature, since scientific knowledge only advances, step by step, through combined efforts and findings. Nevertheless, there is often a lack of communication regarding the more technical and everyday advances in laboratory work, and as a result research progresses less quickly. In recent years, largely thanks to the development of the digital ecosystem, these communication barriers are being overcome, which results in improved transparency and knowledge exchange between scientific teams.

In line with this trend, for the first time, a group of 19 international laboratories has agreed to digitally pool and organise their information on brain metastasis, with the aim of facilitating their research and speeding up obtaining results and effective therapies. This effort was coordinated by the Brain Metastasis Group, led by Manuel Valiente at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), and the information has been integrated into the website of the CNIO Brain Metastasis Cell Lines Panel. The paper is published in Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

A repository of cell lines...

Between 10 and 30% of all cancer patients develop brain metastases, especially from breast, lung and skin tumours, and cases are on the rise. Two of the main challenges of cancer research lie in understanding why some tumour cells manage to overcome the strong defensive barriers of the brain against metastases and to develop therapies against this phenomenon.

Now, these laboratories (from Germany, China, the United States, Ireland, Israel, the United Kingdom, Norway and Switzerland, and the CNIO representing Spain) have joined forces to assemble in the BrMPanel all information generated on more than 60 cell lines related to their research.

Cell lines, a cornerstone of scientific research, are collections of human or animal cells that have been tailored to grow in the laboratory. They are fundamental in biomedical research since they allow reproducing at the cellular and genetic level what happens in a sick organism, in a way that allows gaining a thorough understanding of the mechanisms that produce the disease and exploring effective therapies for it.

"The platform contains cell lines of all kinds," explains Manuel Valiente, initiator and coordinator of the initiative, "from cell lines that have been cultivated in vitro for years, through lines developed from mouse models that spontaneously generated brain metastases, to the so-called PDX lines - extracted from a patient and the most genetically similar to that patient."

... and a 'white paper 'on how to use them in the most effective way

The BrMPanel also explains how to use these biological materials -since each line requires a different strategy depending on what is being studied-, what therapies have been tried in them, and if they have led to a clinical trial in patients and with what result. "Our goal is to encourage more teams to investigate brain metastasis, by facilitating the first step of finding the best model to work with," continues Valiente.

The platform has been very well received since its launch, and with its publication now in Cancer Research, the researchers hope that it will become a white paper for brain metastasis research.

Valiente explains that "it is a pity that it is so difficult to obtain such basic information, which leads to situations like a laboratory dedicating for months resources and efforts to develop a cell line that has already been created by somebody else, with all delays in the study this implies. Now, more than ever, we are at a moment that resources must be optimised and we must make everything we know available to other groups to avoid duplication of work that has already been done."

The researchers also hope that the BrMPanel will grow through contributions from new laboratories, and even that it will inspire other teams to create panels of metastatic cell lines of other organs.

The support of the following funding agencies has made the development and characterisation of some of these research resources possible: The Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, the Melanoma Research Alliance, The Ramón Areces Foundation, Worldwide Cancer Research, the Cancer Research Institute, The Spanish Association Against Cancer, the Ramón y Cajal Programme and the EMBO YIP Programme.

Four-eyed fishes of the genus Anableps and their relatives are a fish family from the Neotropics with a number of bizarre traits that have fascinated naturalists for centuries. These include: (i) a "split" eye that allows them to see both above and under the water surface at the same time; (ii) being live-bearers, meaning that they give birth to fully developed offspring just like mammals; and (iii) conspicuously asymmetric genitalia among the males of all species and among the females of some species.

Asymmetric and polymorphic

The genitalia of the males, so-called gonopodia, are transformed anal fins that can be used as a copulatory organ to inseminate compatible females. Curiously, these penis-like structures are asymmetric and their tip is bent either to the left or to the right. Females in turn have an asymmetric overgrowth of tissue that covers the genital opening laterally. Consequently, only compatible males and females can successfully mate. Within populations, both righties and lefties exist. Strikingly, the question as to whether this asymmetry is heritable or random has remained unresolved for more than a century.

New research carried out by evolutionary biologists from the University of Konstanz in collaboration with the Fundación Miguel Lillo in Argentina and published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B shows that the direction of genital asymmetry in anablepid fishes is not inherited but, in fact, determined randomly.

Why side matters

"We started out with a fairly simple question", says Dr Julián Torres-Dowdall, lead author on the study and a researcher in the University of Konstanz?s Zoology and Evolutionary Biology laboratory led by Professor Axel Meyer: "Do left-sided males father mostly left-sided sons? This may appear to be a strange question to ask, but for evolutionary biologists, asymmetry in general, and the issue of heritability in particular, is incredibly interesting due to its potential to drive the emergence of new species".

Anablepid fishes are especially interesting not only because their genitals are asymmetric - an uncommon trait they share with some insects, snakes, most ruminant mammals, waterfowl and certain fish families. Interestingly, individuals with left or right-sided genitalia can be found at similar proportions within populations. "This is rare and useful at the same time as it allows us to address the issue of heritability and, consequently, to understand the evolution and maintenance of both genital forms (lefties and righties) and its potential to differentiate populations and possibly speciation", adds Torres-Dowdall.

Chance, not genetics

To determine whether sidedness of genitalia in anablepid fishes is determined genetically and passed down to the next generation, the researchers studied two genera of the Anablepidae family: Anableps, which comprises three species of four-eyed fish, and Jenynsia, a genus comprised of 15 species of one-sided live-bearers. Combining breeding experiments with genomic analyses, the team established that there is no strong heritability to the direction of genital asymmetry in anablepid fishes.

"Our experiments with both captive and natural populations showed that all offspring were asymmetric - with a near-equal proportion of left and right genitalia in the natural populations and in the breeding experiment", says Torres-Dowdall. In both cases, the sons' genital sidedness was independent from the father's sidedness. "This strongly suggests that the direction of asymmetry is determined by chance rather than heredity and goes some way towards explaining the persistence of this peculiar trait over time".

Incompatibility between morphs not a driver of speciation

The genomic analyses showed no evidence that genetic markers, i.e. specific regions of the genome, are associated with genital asymmetry. Furthermore, there was no evidence of accumulated genomic differences between left- and right-sided individuals. This conforms with the general pattern found in other species with similar asymmetric traits. Also, there is no suggestion that the existence of left and right-sided genitalia should be regarded as potential drivers of speciation: "There is the idea that incompatibility between left and right-sided individuals might potentially result in the evolution of two new asymmetric, yet either left or right-sided, species", explains Torres-Dowdall. "However, for a new species to evolve, variation in the direction of asymmetry would have to have a genetic component. Our study strongly suggests that this is not the case with anablepid fishes".

Lead halide perovskites can be turned into optoelectronic devices through low-cost solution depositions, but these approaches often leave numerous charge-trapping defects in the perovskite. Continuously improving the performance of these optoelectronic devices is needed to overcome the bottleneck problem. The defect (including surface defects and volume defects) density in perovskites is a key parameter that limits the performance of these materials. To control the surface defects, a widely studied method is to passivate and cure the defects by a surface engineering process, which can be achieved by adding a variety of additives, including ammonium methyl bromide, guanidinium bromide, potassium iodide18, phenethyl iodide, poly(3-hexylthiophene-2,5-diyl), choline iodine, and 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium tetrafluoroborate. However, this method requires precise control of the amount of the additives, the order of addition, and the reaction time, which makes this process complicated and results in a high risk of loss. To tune the volume defects, a known strategy is irradiating perovskite with high-energy ultraviolet light, sunlight, near-infrared light, etc. This strategy requires a long repair time and sometimes results in irreversible damage to the materials, which makes the process complicated. Therefore, highly efficient and convenient pathways to regulate defects in perovskites are still needed.

In a new paper published in Light Science & Application, the team of scientists, led by Associate Professor Weili Yu, Professor Chunlei Guo from the Photonics Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Applied Optics, Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Professor Qingfeng Dong from State Key Laboratory of Supramolecular Structure and Materials, Jilin University have jointly developed a technique (voltage regulation engineering) for modifying the defect population of perovskite crystals without requiring chemical additives.

The team used probes to apply an electric field to the surface of a perovskite sample for helping move injected charges into defect sites with a high degree of control, as well as the optical and electrical properties of perovskite sample. Futhermore, the optimized defect populations enabled the perovskite to act as memristor device, capable of activating multiple resistance states.

These scientists summarize the operational principle of the voltage regulation engineering: "The voltage regulation engineering as an efficient strategy can regulate the defects in perovskites and influence its dynamic carrier transport. The injected charges act as a Lewis base can be trapped by lead defects in the surface layer and further passivate the deep-level donor-like defects inside the perovskites. Thus, these "cured" defects no longer trap carriers, and the probability of radiation recombination in perovskites is enhanced, which further improve its optical and electrical properties."

"This work provides novel insight into the flexibility of the defect density of perovskites, and voltage regulation is an effective engineering method to tune not only the defect density but also the carrier lifetime, PL intensity and resistance. This work will improve the optimization of optoelectronic devices based on perovskites single crystals." they added and forecast.

BEER-SHEVA, Israel...July 8, 2020 - Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) have determined how to pinpoint the location of a drone operator who may be operating maliciously or harmfully near airports or protected airspace by analyzing the flight path of the drone.

Drones (small commercial unmanned aerial systems) pose significant security risks due to their agility, accessibility and low cost. As a result, there is a growing need to develop methods for detection, localization and mitigation of malicious and other harmful aircraft operation.

The paper, which was led by senior lecturer and drone expert Dr. Gera Weiss from BGU's Department of Computer Science, was presented at the Fourth International Symposium on Cyber Security, Cryptography and Machine Learning (CSCML 2020) on July 3rd.

"Currently, drone operators are located using RF techniques and require sensors around the flight area which can then be triangulated," says lead researcher Eliyahu Mashhadi, a BGU computer science student. "This is challenging due to the amount of other WiFi, Bluetooth and IoT signals in the air that obstruct drone signals."

The researchers trained a deep neural network to predict the location of drone operators, using only the path of the drones, which does not require additional sensors. "Our system can now identify patterns in the drone's route when the drone is in motion, and use it to locate the drone operator" Mashhadi says.

When tested in simulated drone paths, the model was able to predict the operator location with 78% accuracy. The next step in the project would be to repeat this experiment with data captured from real drones.

"Now that we know we can identify the drone operator location, it would be interesting to explore what additional data can be extracted from this information," says Dr. Yossi Oren, a senior lecturer in BGU's Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering and head of the Implementation Security and Side-Channel Attacks Lab, who also contributed to the research. "Possible insights would include the technical experience level and even precise identity of the drone operator."

"If you saw a Chihuahua barking as deep as a Rottweiler, you would definitely be surprised", says Andrea Ravignani, a researcher at the MPI and the Dutch Sealcentre Pieterburen. Body size influences the frequency of the sounds animals produce, but many animals found ways to sound 'smaller' or 'bigger' than expected. "Nature is full of animals like squeaky-Rottweilers and tenor-Chihuahuas", explains Ravignani. Some animals fake their size by developing larger vocal organs that lower their sound, which makes them sound larger than you would expect. Other animals are good at controlling the sounds they produce. Such strategies (called 'dishonest signalling' by biologists) could be driven by sexual selection, as males with larger body size or superior singing skills (hitting very high or low notes) attract more females (or vice versa).

Garcia and Ravignani wondered whether some animals may have learned to make new sounds as a strategy to attract mates. Few animal species are capable of vocal learning, among them mammals such as seals, dolphins, bats and elephants. For instance, seals can imitate sounds, and some seals copy call types of successfully breeding individuals. Would animals who often 'fake' their body size also be the ones capable of learning new sounds?

The researchers analysed the sounds and body size of 164 different mammals, ranging from mice and monkeys to water dwelling mammals such as the subantarctic fur seal and the Amazonian manatee. They combined methods from acoustics, anatomy, and evolutionary biology to compare the different sorts of animals in the dataset.

The scientists found that animals who 'fake' their body size are often skilled sound learners. According to Garcia and Ravignani, their framework provides a new way of investigating the evolution of communication systems. "We want to expand our theory to take into account other evolutionary pressures, not just sexual selection", adds Ravignani. "We also want to replicate our preliminary findings with more mammals and test whether our ideas also apply to birds or other taxonomic groups."

In their position paper, Garcia and Ravignani suggest that there may be a link to human speech evolution. "We believe that a 'dishonest signalling' strategy may be a first evolutionary step towards learning how to make new sounds of any sort", says Garcia. "Speculatively, it brings us closer to understanding human speech evolution: our ancestors may have learnt how to speak after learning how to sound bigger or how to hit high notes".

Workers in jobs that typically involve heavy lifting, frequent climbing, prolonged kneeling, squatting, and standing face an increased risk of developing knee osteoarthritis. That's the conclusion of a new analysis published in Arthritis Care & Research.

Knee osteoarthritis is a highly prevalent, chronic condition and one of the leading contributors to loss of work and disability. To see if certain jobs put individuals at higher risk, investigators analyzed the results of relevant studies published to date.

The combined results from 71 studies with over 950,000 participants revealed significantly higher odds of knee osteoarthritis in physically demanding job titles including farmers, builders, metal workers, floor layers, miners, cleaners, and service workers. Compared with sedentary (or low physically active) workers, agricultural workers had up to a 64% increased odds of knee osteoarthritis. Similarly, builders and floor layers had a 63% increased odds of knee osteoarthritis.

"This collaborative research informs workplace regulators by identifying people frequently involved in specific work activities who may be susceptible to knee osteoarthritis, the most common joint disorder worldwide," said lead author Xia Wang, MMed, PhD, of the University of Sydney, in Australia. "Thus, tailored preventive strategies need to be implemented early on to adapt the aging workforces in many countries that push for longer employment trajectories."

Parents may worry that spending time on their smartphones has a negative impact on their relationships with their children. However, a new comprehensive analysis published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry found that this is unlikely to be the case.

In the analysis of data from 3, 659 parent-based surveys, the authors tested 84 different possibilities to assess whether smartphone use was associated with parenting, and they found little evidence. Accordingly, they explored whether the effect of phone use on parenting depended on whether it displaced time with family and was associated with family conflict.

At low levels of displacing time with family, more smartphone use was associated with better (not worse) parenting. The authors noted that, especially considering diverse family environments, smartphones play multiple roles in family life, and when not heavily impacting on family time, may have a positive role in parenting.

"The challenge with much of the technology-family literature is that is has mainly stemmed from an assumption of risk and problems. As a result, small and uneven findings can become the focus of media, policymakers, and parents," said lead author Kathryn L. Modecki, PhD, of Menzies Health Institute Queensland, Griffith University, in Australia. "This is an issue because it can cloud our insight as we focus on ways to meaningfully assist parents and families to enhance positive outcomes." Thus, Dr. Modecki and her colleagues used a transparent approach that mapped a myriad of ways that smartphones could link to family wellbeing. "We found very little evidence of problems and hope these data help move us towards more constructive and nuanced conversations around families' diverse experiences with technology, actual risks associated with parenting, and where we can best support," she said.

AURORA, Colo. (July 8, 2020) - In an effort to combat a growing worldwide epidemic of Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD), scientists have discovered a new target and a new therapy that has shown promising results in preclinical mouse models, according to researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

"NAFLD is a major health issue right now, a real epidemic with no treatment. It affects about 25% of the world population," said the study's lead author Mercedes Rincon, PhD, professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. "The incidence is higher in those who are obese, but it is not restricted to them."

The study was published last week in the journal Nature Communications.

NAFLD is characterized by the accumulation of fat in the liver which can lead to fibrosis and eventually Non-Alcoholic Steatohepatitis (NASH), an advanced phase of NAFLD that can cause liver failure and death. It is now the most common form of chronic liver disease with no drugs currently approved to treat it.

The researchers focused on MCJ or Methylation-Controlled J Protein as a target for NASH. This protein lives in the mitochondria, the engine of the cells, where lipids are burned in the liver. MCJ acts as a brake on the metabolic activity of the mitochondria. Patients with NAFLD often have higher MCJ levels in their livers.

But MCJ is not critical for life under normal conditions, so Rincon's team decided to eliminate this metabolic brake in the liver to increase fat burning and minimize the accumulation of lipids and the development of fibrosis. They used siRNA or Small Interfering RNA to silence MCJ in the liver. This is an emerging therapeutic approach that has shown success in treating some liver diseases.

To test if siRNA for MCJ (called siMCJ) could be a potential therapeutic against NAFLD, mice in preclinical studies were fed a high-fat, high fructose diet. After months on the diet, the mice developed fatty liver. Then they were treated regularly with siMCJ or a placebo. The siMCJ group had lower levels of lipids and fibrosis in their livers compared to the control group. Using this treatment, similar reductions in lipid content and fibrosis were seen in another model on a low protein diet.

"We showed that MCJ-deficient mice are resistant to the development of fatty liver and NASH," Rincon said. "Importantly, using siRNA as a therapeutic approach we show that treatment with different formulations of siMCJ after the onset of the disease reduces liver steatosis and fibrosis in multiple mouse models."

A key aspect of this therapy is delivering it to the right part of the liver. The researchers combined the siRNA with GalNac, a sugar derivative that binds directly to hepatocytes, cells that make up the majority of the liver.

The result, the study said, is that MCJ is emerging as an alternative target for treating NASH and NAFLD.

"Currently, most leading therapeutic drugs undergoing clinical trials for NASH are small molecules given as a systemic treatment," Rincon said. "Our data show, in contrast, that the use of siRNA to reduce the levels of MCJ in the liver may constitute an alternative therapeutic strategy."

Guangzhou, July 3, 2020: New journal BIO Integration (BIOI) has been launched with the publication of volume 1, issue 1. BIOI is a peer-reviewed, open access, international journal, which is dedicated to spreading multidisciplinary views driving the advancement of modern medicine. Aimed at bridging the gap between the laboratory, clinic, and biotechnology industries, it will offer a cross-disciplinary platform devoted to communicating advances in the biomedical research field and offering insights into different areas of life science, in order to encourage cooperation and exchange among scientists, clinical researchers, and health care providers.

Featured papers in this issue are:

The first featured article in this issue is an opinion article entitled "The Significance of Interdisciplinary Integration in Academic Research and Application" by authors Phei Er Saw and Shanping Jiang. Interdisciplinary integration is a requirement for disciplinary development in the modern social environment. What can we learn from interdisciplinary integration in COVID¬19 research? The authors use COVID¬19 research as an example to emphasize the importance of interdisciplinary, and the realization of, integrative research.

The second featured article in this issue is a review article entitled "Immunoscore Guided Cold Tumors to Acquire "Temperature" Through Integrating Physicochemical and Biological Methods" by authors Jing Liu, Mengze Xu and Zhen Yuan. Immunotherapy for the treatment of tumors has become the most compelling strategy after targeted treatment, especially for lung cancer, melanoma, and some blood cancers. In this paper, the authors summarize the use of immunoscore, which provides a better prognosis for cancer patients. The authors also outline the features of the most difficult-to-treat and challenging cold tumors and potential approaches to transform "cold" tumors into "hot" tumors.

The third featured article in this issue is a review article entitled "Nanobiohybrids: A Synergistic Integration of Bacteria and Nanomaterials in Cancer Therapy" by authors Yuhao Chen, Meng Du, Jinsui Yu, Lang Rao, Xiaoyuan Chen and Zhiyi Chen. Developing targeted drug delivery systems is of great significance in selectively delivering drugs to tumor regions. Since the low tumor-targeting ability of nanomaterials limits their clinical application, the authors focus on the usage of nanobiohybrids constructed by the combination of bacteria and nanomaterials. These have many usage applications, including tumor targeting ability, genetic modifiability, programmed product synthesis, and multimodal therapy. Bacteria-based nanobiohybrids have the potential to provide a targeted and effective approach for cancer treatment.

How can some of world’s biggest problems – climate change, food security and land degradation – be tackled simultaneously?
Some lesser-known options, such as integrated water management and increasing the organic content of soil, have fewer trade-offs than many well-known options, such as planting trees, according to a Rutgers-led study in the journal Global Change Biology.
“We argue that if we want to have an impact on multiple problems, we need to be smart about what options get us multiple benefits and which options come with potential trade-offs,” said lead author Pamela McElwee, an associate professor in the Department of Human Ecology in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. “We found that many of the better-known solutions to climate mitigation and land degradation come with a lot of potentially significant trade-offs.”
The idea of planting trees in vast areas to remove carbon dioxide from the air and reduce the impact of climate change, for example, has attracted a lot of attention, with some claiming it’s the best “low-hanging fruit” approach to pursue, McElwee said. But large-scale tree planting could conflict directly with food security because both compete for available land. It could also diminish biodiversity, if fast-growing exotic trees replace native habitat.
Some potential options that don’t get as much attention globally, but are quite promising with fewer trade-offs, include integrated water management, reducing post-harvest losses in agriculture, improving fire management, agroforestry (integrating trees and shrubs with croplands and pastures) and investing in disaster risk management, she said.
The study examined possible synergies and trade-offs with environmental and development goals. It was based on a massive literature review – essentially 1,400 individual literature reviews – conducted by scientists at many institutions. They compared 40 options to tackle the interrelated problems of climate change, food security and land degradation and looked for trade-offs or co-benefits with 18 categories of services provided by ecosystems, such as clean air and clean water, and the United Nations’ 17 sustainable development goals. The work was done as part of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Climate Change and Land released last year. Such reports offer only highlights, and this study includes all the details.
Several interventions show potentially significant negative impacts on sustainable development goals and ecosystem services. These include bioenergy (plant-based sources of energy such as wood fuels or ethanol) and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, large-scale afforestation and some risk-sharing measures, such as commercial crop insurance.
The results show that a better understanding of the benefits and trade-offs of different policy approaches can help decision-makers choose the more effective – or at least the more benign – interventions.
“Policy officials can’t always undertake the kind of work we did, so we hope our findings provide a useful shorthand for decision-makers,” McElwee said. “We hope it helps them make the choices needed to improve future policy, such as strengthened pledges to tackle climate mitigation under the 2015 Paris Agreement. There are a lot of potential steps for reducing carbon emissions that aren’t as well-known but should be on the table.”

Journal

Global Change Biology

DOI

10.1111/gcb.15219

HOUSTON -- (July 7, 2020) -- Climate change will intensify winds that steer hurricanes north over Texas in the final 25 years of this century, increasing the odds for fast-moving storms like 2008's Ike compared with slow-movers like 2017's Harvey, according to new research.

The study published online July 3 in Nature Communications examined regional atmospheric wind patterns that are likely to exist over Texas from 2075-2100 as Earth's climate changes due to increased greenhouse emissions.

The research began in Houston as Harvey deluged the city with 30-40 inches of rain over five days. Rice University researchers riding out the storm began collaborating with colleagues from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) and Harvard University to explore whether climate change would increase the likelihood of slow-moving rainmakers like Harvey.

"We find that the probability of having strong northward steering winds will increase with climate change, meaning hurricanes over Texas will be more likely to move like Ike than Harvey," said study lead author Pedram Hassanzadeh of Rice.

Harvey caused an estimated $125 billion in damage, matching 2005's Katrina as the costliest hurricane in U.S. history. Ike was marked by coastal flooding and high winds that caused $38 billion damage across several states. It was the second-costliest U.S. hurricane at the time and has since moved to sixth. Ike struck Galveston around 2 a.m. Sept. 13, 2008, crossed Texas in less than one day and caused record power outages from Arkansas to Ohio on Sept. 14.

Hassanzadeh, a fluid dynamicist, atmospheric modeler and assistant professor of both mechanical engineering and Earth, environmental and planetary sciences, said the findings don't suggest that slow-moving storms like Harvey won't happen in late 21st century. Rather, they suggest that storms during the period will be more likely to be fast-moving than slow-moving. The study found the chances that a Texas hurricane will be fast-moving as opposed to slow-moving will rise by about 50% in the last quarter of the 21st century compared with the final quarter of the 20th century.

"These results are very interesting, given that a previous study that considered the Atlantic basin as a whole noticed a trend for slower-moving storms in the past 30 years," said study co-author Suzana Camargo, LDEO's Marie Tharp Lamont Research Professor. "By contrast, our study focused on changes at the end of the 21st century and shows that we need to consider much smaller regional scales, as their trends might differ from the average across much larger regions."

Hassanzadeh said the researchers used more than a dozen different computer models to produce several hundred simulations and found that "all of them agreed on an increase in northward steering winds over Texas."

Steering winds are strong currents in the lower 10 kilometers of the atmosphere that move hurricanes.

"It doesn't happen a lot, in studying the climate system, that you get such a robust regional signal in wind patterns," he said.

Harvey was the first hurricane Hassanzadeh experienced. He'd moved to Houston the previous year and was stunned by the slow-motion destruction that played out as bayous, creeks and rivers in and around the city topped their banks.

"I was sitting at home watching, just looking at the rain when (study co-author) Laurence (Yeung) emailed a bunch of us, asking 'What's going on? Why is this thing not moving?'" Hassanzadeh recalled. "That got things going. People started replying. That's the good thing about being surrounded by smart people. Laurence got us started, and things took off."

Yeung, an atmospheric chemist, Hassanzadeh and two other Rice professors on the original email, atmospheric scientist Dan Cohan and flooding expert Phil Bedient, won one of the first grants from Rice's Houston Engagement and Recovery Effort (HERE), a research fund Rice established in response to Harvey.

"Without that, we couldn't have done this work," Hassanzadeh said. The HERE grant allowed Rice co-author Ebrahim Nabizadeh, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, to work for several months, analyzing the first of hundreds of computer simulations based on large-scale climate models.

The day Harvey made landfall, Hassanzadeh also had reached out to Columbia's Chia-Ying Lee, an expert in both tropical storms and climate downscaling, procedures that use known information at large scales to make projections at local scales. Lee and Camargo used information from the large-scale simulations to make a regional model that simulated storms' tracks over Texas in a warming climate.

"One challenge of studying the impact of climate change on hurricanes at a regional level is the lack of data," said Lee, a Lamont Assistant Research Professor at LDEO. "At Columbia University, we have developed a downscaling model that uses physics-based statistics to connect large-scale atmospheric conditions to the formation, movement and intensity of hurricanes. The model's physical basis allowed us to account for the impact of climate change, and its statistical features allowed us to simulate a sufficient number of Texas storms."

Hassanzadeh said, "Once we found that robust signal, where all the models agreed, we thought, 'There should be a robust mechanism that's causing this.'"

He reached out to tropical climate dynamicist Ding Ma of Harvard to get another perspective.

"We were able to show that changes in two important processes were joining forces and resulting in the strong signal from the models," said Ma, a postdoctoral researcher in Earth and planetary sciences.

One of the processes was the Atlantic subtropical high, or Bermuda high, a semipermanent area of high pressure that forms over the Atlantic Ocean during the summer, and the other was the North American monsoon, an uptick in rainfall and thunderstorms over the southwestern U.S. and northwestern Mexico that typically occurs between July and September. Hassanzadeh said recent studies have shown that each of these are projected to change as Earth's climate warms.

"The subtropical high is a clockwise circulation to the east that is projected to intensify and shift westward, producing more northward winds over Texas," he said. "The North American monsoon, to the west, produces a clockwise circulation high in the troposphere. That circulation is expected to weaken, resulting in increased, high-level northward winds over Texas."

Hassanzadeh said the increased northward winds from both east and west "gives you a strong reinforcing effect over the whole troposphere, up to about 10 kilometers, over Texas. This has important implications for the movement of future Texas hurricanes."

Models showed that the effect extended into western Louisiana, but the picture became murkier as the researchers looked further east, he said.

"You don't have the robust signal like you do over Texas," Hassanzadeh said. "If you look at Florida, for instance, there's a lot of variation in the models. This shows how important it is to conduct studies that focus on climate impacts in specific regions. If we had looked at all of North America, for example, and tried to average over the whole region, we would have missed this localized mechanism over Texas."

Chronic and recurrent bacterial diseases are treatment-resistant due to the ability of the pathogens to establish biofilms, which act as fortresses built of extracellular DNA and proteins to protect populations of the bacteria.

For more than 11 years, researchers Lauren Bakaletz, PhD, and Steve Goodman, PhD, have been working to understand and dismantle biofilms.

"Biofilms are involved in the majority of chronic and recurrent bacterial diseases in the respiratory tract, oral cavity, gastrointestinal tract and urogenital tract," said Dr. Bakaletz, director of the Center for Microbial Pathogenesis and vice president of Basic Sciences at the Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children's (AWRI). "Our work has been to understand the structure and function of biofilms, and ultimately, to find a novel approach to prevent or eradicate them."

Earlier this year, Drs. Bakaletz, Goodman and their team reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) the role of the DNABII family of bacterial DNA-binding proteins as the "lynchpin" of the biofilm structures.

In their latest paper, published today in EBioMedicine, they demonstrate how using a new platform technology of DNABII-directed antibodies can rapidly disrupt existing biofilms- and prevent them from forming at all.

"This approach attacks a feature common to all biofilms - it's worked on every type of biofilm we've tested," said Dr. Goodman, study author and director of the Oral GI Microbiology Research Affinity Group in the Center for Microbial Pathogenesis at AWRI. "We believe this technology has the potential to resolve infections characterized by communities of heterogenous bacteria where other single-pathogen approaches have failed."

In a preclinical model of otitis media caused by nontypeable Haemophilus inluenzae (NTHI), a monoclonal antibody against a chimeric peptide immunogen designed to target specific regions of the DNABIII proteins, as well as its antigen-binding fragment, was used to disrupt established biofilms. In the preclinical model, this approach resolved the NTHI-induced disease and eradicated the biofilms from the middle ears.

Next, the team used the chimeric peptide immunogen as a preventative immunization, which induced antibodies that prevented biofilm formation and disease development in a viral-bacterial coinfection model.

Finally, the team humanized a monoclonal antibody against the chimeric peptide immunogen, then characterized and validated that it maintained therapeutic efficacy both in vitro and in vivo.

"With this novel approach, we have an opportunity to shift the paradigm for clinical management of a multitude of diseases characterized by recalcitrant biofilms that evade effective intervention today," said Dr. Bakaletz. "Our results from this study are highly supportive of entry into both preventative and therapeutic clinical trials."

HOUSTON -- (July 7, 2020) -- Rice University chemical engineers found an efficient catalyst for destroying PFAS "forever" chemicals where they least expected.

"It was the control," said Rice Professor Michael Wong, referring to the part of a scientific experiment where researchers don't expect surprises. The control group is the yardstick of experimental science, the baseline by which variables are measured.

"We haven't yet tested this at a full scale, but in our benchtop tests in the lab, we could get rid of 99% of PFOA in four hours," Wong said of boron nitride, the light-activated catalyst he and his students stumbled upon and spent more than a year testing.

Their study, which is available online in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, found boron nitride destroyed PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid) at a faster clip than any previously reported photocatalyst. PFOA is one of the most prevalent PFAS (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances), a family of more than 4,000 compounds developed in the 20th century to make coatings for waterproof clothing, food packaging, nonstick pans and countless other uses. PFAS have been dubbed forever chemicals for their tendency to linger in the environment, and scientists have found them in the blood of virtually all Americans, including newborns.

Catalysts are Wong's specialty. They are compounds that bring about chemical reactions without taking part or being consumed in those reactions. His lab has created catalysts for destroying a number of pollutants, including TCE and nitrates, and he said he tasked his team with finding new catalysts to address PFAS about 18 months ago.

"We tried a lot of things," said Wong, chair of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in Rice's Brown School of Engineering. "We tried several materials that I thought were going to work. None of them did. This wasn't supposed to work, and it did."

The catalyst, boron nitride powder, or BN, is a commercially available synthetic mineral that's widely used in makeup, skin care products, thermal pastes that cool computer chips and other consumer and industrial products.

The discovery began with dozens of failed experiments on more likely PFAS catalysts. Wong said he asked two members of his lab, visiting graduate student Lijie Duan of China's Tsinghua University and Rice graduate student Bo Wang, to do final experiments on one set of candidate compounds before moving on to others.

"There was literature that suggested one of them might be a photocatalyst, meaning it would be activated by light of a particular wavelength," Wong said. "We don't use light very often in our group, but I said, 'Let's go ahead and doodle around with it.' The sun is free energy. Let's see what we can do with light."

As before, none of the experimental groups performed well, but Duan noticed something unusual with the boron nitride control. She and Wang repeated the experiments numerous times to rule out unexpected errors, problems with sample preparation and other explanations for the strange result. They kept seeing the same thing.

"Here's the observation," Wong said. "You take a flask of water that contains some PFOA, you throw in your BN powder, and you seal it up. That's it. You don't need to add any hydrogen or purge it with oxygen. It's just the air we breathe, the contaminated water and the BN powder. You expose that to ultraviolet light, specifically to UV-C light with a wavelength of 254 nanometers, come back in four hours, and 99% of the PFOA has been transformed into fluoride, carbon dioxide and hydrogen."

The problem was the light. The 254-nanometer wavelength, which is commonly used in germicidal lamps, is too small to activate the bandgap in boron nitride. While that was unquestionably true, the experiments suggested it could not be.

"If you take away the light, you don't get catalysis," Wong said. "If you leave out the BN powder and only use the light, you don't get a reaction."

So boron nitride was clearly absorbing the light and catalyzing a reaction that destroyed PFOA, despite that fact that it should have been optically impossible for boron nitride to absorb 254-nanometer UV-C light.

"It's not supposed to work," Wong said. "That's why no one ever thought to look for this, and that's why it took so long for us to publish the results. We needed some sort of explanation for this contradiction."

Wong said he, Duan, Wang and co-authors offered a plausible explanation in the study.

"We concluded that our material does absorb the 254-nanometer light, and it's because of atomic defects in our powder," he said. "The defects change the bandgap. They shrink it enough for the powder to absorb just enough light to create the reactive oxidizing species that chew up the PFOA."

Wong said more experimental evidence will be needed to confirm the explanation. But in light of the results with PFOA, he wondered if the boron nitride catalyst might also work on other PFAS compounds.

"So I asked my students to do one more thing," Wong said. "I had them replace PFOA in the tests with GenX."

GenX is also a forever chemical. When PFOA was banned, GenX was one of the most widely used chemicals to replace it. And a growing body of evidence suggests that GenX could be just as big an environmental problem as its predecessor.

"It's a similar story to PFOA," Wong said. "They're finding GenX everywhere now. But one difference between the two is that people have previously reported some success with catalysts for degrading PFOA. They haven't for GenX."

Wong and colleagues found that boron nitride powder also destroys GenX. The results weren't as good as with PFOA: With two hours exposure to 254-nanometer light, BN destroyed about 20% of the GenX in water samples. But Wong said the team has ideas about how to improve the catalyst for GenX.

He said the project has already attracted the attention of several industrial partners in the Rice-based Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT). NEWT is an interdisciplinary engineering research center funded by the National Science Foundation to develop off-grid water treatment systems that both protect human lives and support sustainable economic development.

"The research has been fun, a true team effort," Wong said. "We've filed patents on this, and NEWT's interest in further testing and development of the technology is a big vote of confidence."

The heart needs energy to pump blood. So, energy production defects in heart muscles result in a variety of cardiac diseases.

Texas A&M AgriLife scientists have now discovered a new link between calcium, heart energy production and cardiolipin, a type of fat. The discovery helps explain heart defects in the rare genetic disorder Barth syndrome.

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on June 29, was led by Vishal M. Gohil, Ph.D., Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Other coauthors were from University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. The research funding for this study came from the Welch Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

HEART DEFECTS IN BARTH SYNDROME

Barth syndrome is a rare genetic disease occurring almost exclusively in boys. The affected children suffer from heart and muscle weakness from early childhood. In this debilitating disease, patients have trouble doing routine activities such as walking and running. Often, their hearts are weak and enlarged.

People with Barth syndrome have a genetic defect that interferes with their body's ability to make cardiolipin. As the name suggests, cardiolipin is present in large amounts in cardiac -- heart -- muscles. Cardiolipin belongs to a class of molecules called lipids.

Within muscle cells, cardiolipin is found in mitochondria, which are known as the "powerhouse" of the cell because they produce biological energy from the food we eat. Cardiolipin and other lipids form the membrane "skin" of mitochondria, but cardiolipin seems to be a particularly crucial component. A shortage of cardiolipin undermines mitochondria's ability to produce energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate, ATP.

A LINK BETWEEN CARDIOLIPIN, ENERGY AND CALCIUM

When cells need a burst of energy, they use calcium as a signal to urge mitochondria to ramp up energy production. Calcium ions enter mitochondria through a special channel in the mitochondrial membrane. Because the calcium channel is present in the same membrane with cardiolipin and other lipids, Gohil and his team wondered what effect the lipids have on the channel.

"We knew this channel sits in the mitochondrial membrane, so we asked, could the lipids in the membrane impact how this channel functions?" said Gohil.

BAKER'S YEAST HELPS STUDY ENERGY PRODUCTION IN BARTH SYNDROME

Gohil's lab had previously figured out a way to make yeast mitochondria deficient in various lipids, including cardiolipin. Yeasts have mitochondria that closely resemble those of humans in many ways, but they lack the calcium channel.

Sagnika Ghosh, the study's lead author and a graduate student in Gohil's lab, genetically modified baker's yeast mitochondria to include the human calcium channel. She then examined what happens to calcium transport when the membrane's lipid composition changes.

"We found that the calcium channel was not stable in a mitochondrial membrane with a low amount of cardiolipin, such as the amount seen in Barth syndrome patients," Gohil said.

CONFIRMATION IN PATIENT SAMPLES

Next, the team acquired cells and heart tissue samples from Barth syndrome patients. The team confirmed what they saw in their experiments in yeast also happens in the patient samples. Because the mitochondrial calcium channels were unstable, the mitochondria of Barth syndrome patients were much less permeable to calcium than those of healthy cells.

So, when a patient's cells need a burst of energy, sending a calcium signal to mitochondria may not ramp up energy production as it would in a healthy cell.

"Starting from a fundamental scientific question, our work led to a discovery related to human health," Gohil said. "In this genetic disease, a defect in calcium uptake in turn could affect energy production. What we observed in yeast was also true in human cells."

WHAT'S NEXT?

Gohil's lab has recently acquired research funding from the Barth Syndrome Foundation to investigate these findings further. The team will use Barth syndrome patient cells to describe how much calcium signaling contributes to the symptoms of the disease.