Tech

Algae in the oceans often steal genes from bacteria to gain beneficial attributes, such as the ability to tolerate stressful environments or break down carbohydrates for food, according to a Rutgers co-authored study.

The study of 23 species of brown and golden-brown algae, published in the journal Science Advances, shows for the first time that gene acquisition had a significant impact on the evolution of a massive and ancient group of algae and protists (mostly one-celled organisms including protozoa) that help form the base of oceanic food webs. These photosynthetic species produce about 70 percent of the oxygen we breathe and some of them, such as diatoms, are responsible for about 45 percent of global primary production of organic matter.

"The vast group of species called CRASH, including algae such as diatoms and dinoflagellates, as well as members of the group (alveolates) that includes the malaria parasite and another group (oomycetes) that includes the potato blight pathogen, creates and consumes immense amounts of organic matter," said corresponding author Debashish Bhattacharya, a distinguished professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. "There are hundreds of thousands of CRASH species and they have thrived on Earth for more than a billion years."

The scientists, led by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences, created a massive genomic dataset of more than 524,000 protein sequences from 23 CRASH species and used sophisticated methods to analyze the data.

The results showed that gene stealing or acquisition (known as horizontal gene transfer) varies substantially among different CRASH species, with 0.16 percent to 1.44 percent of their genes (an average of 1 percent) coming from bacteria.

Anemia is a global health problem common in low-income countries. Severe cases can lead to fatigue, heart problems, and complications in pregnancy. When widespread, anemia can also weigh on national economies.

Anemia's leading cause is iron deficiency. Unfortunately, iron supplements or diet diversification is not always an option for addressing anemia for the rural poor. Enhancing the iron content of farm-grown staples like beans may be a sustainable, inexpensive, and effective alternative, research shows.

A new study involving women of reproductive age in Rwanda, where 19% of that demographic is anemic, showed that a diet including high-iron beans can improve iron status and physical performance relatively quickly.

Published in the Journal of Nutrition in January, researchers say the study is the first food intervention to demonstrate that changes in hemoglobin or ferritin - indicators of blood iron levels - from consuming iron-enhanced beans twice a day (as traditionally consumed) improves work efficiency in iron-deficient women.

"Our study found that the increases in markers of iron status in women who consumed the iron-biofortified beans led to improvements in their work efficiency," said Mercy Lung'aho, a co-author at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT.

Iron-biofortified beans are varieties that are conventionally bred - meaning they are not genetically modified - to contain higher levels of iron. Consumption of biofortified crops is promoted by HarvestPlus, which is part of the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH).

"This is the first study to show an effect of a food-based intervention on moderate levels of physical work capacity," said Jere D. Haas, a co-author and Emeritus Professor of Nutrition at Cornell University.

Haas said previous studies involving iron supplements had shown that improving iron status in iron-deficient adults can improve their ability to perform heavy work.

The study builds on previous research in Rwanda that showed consumption of iron-biofortified beans was also linked to improved cognitive function in adult women.

Biofortified benefits

The Rwanda study included 125 female college students ages 18 to 26 who had depleted iron stores but were otherwise healthy. The subjects were randomly assigned to either a group that received iron-biofortified beans or one that received non-biofortified beans.

The women in both groups received two meals a day over 18 weeks. Those who ate iron-biofortified beans, and whose hemoglobin (a measure of anemia) or iron status improved, exhibited a significant reduction in the energy needed to perform light physical work, such as walking, cleaning or other household chores.

In sub-Saharan Africa, 37% of women are anemic and nearly one in three cases is caused by iron deficiency. Iron-biofortified beans, currently available in 14 countries, contain up to twice the amount of iron as other common bean varieties. When eaten twice daily, these beans can provide up to 80% of daily iron needs.

"Common beans are an important source of multiple nutrients and health-promoting phytochemicals in several low- and middle-income countries where iron deficiency remains a public health problem," said Erick Boy, Head of Nutrition at HarvestPlus.

"This study confirms that not only can biofortified beans effectively build up young women's iron stores to ensure healthy future pregnancies, but also that regular consumption can potentially help women derive greater productivity from paid physical work (e.g., in agriculture) and not get physically fatigued as easily," Boy said.

HarvestPlus, in collaboration with multiple partners, promotes high-iron beans and several other biofortified staple crops in countries worldwide. By the end of 2018, 1 in 5 bean growers in Rwanda grew biofortified beans, which are also high-yielding, disease-resistant, and tolerant of heat and drought.

"As suggested by the economic studies from China and South Asia, improvements in worker efficiency from resolving iron deficiency could lead to significant improvements in other aspects of workers' lives and communities," said Lung'aho. "As biofortification targets low-resource individuals, who often rely on manual labor for sustenance, our study's demonstrated improvements in physical work efficiency have the potential to make a truly meaningful impact on their daily lives and productivity."

Scientists have long opposed the idea that dinosaurs lived in aquatic habitats. Now, an international team of researchers, supported by the National Geographic Society, has discovered unambiguous evidence that Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, the longest predatory dinosaur known to science, was aquatic and used tail-propelled swimming locomotion to hunt for prey in a massive river system. It is the first time that such an adaptation has been reported in a dinosaur.

The findings, published today in the journal Nature and featured on Nationalgeographic.com, are based on a multidisciplinary investigation of the world's only existing Spinosaurus skeleton, found in the Kem Kem region of the Moroccan Sahara. The skeleton is now also the most complete one to date for a Cretaceous predatory dinosaur from mainland Africa.

Led by National Geographic Explorer and University of Detroit Mercy paleontologist Dr. Nizar Ibrahim, the team returned to the site where parts of a Spinosaurus skeleton had first been uncovered in 2008. In a previous study, Spinosaurus had been identified as a fish-eating dinosaur with adaptations for an amphibious lifestyle, supported by its relatively short hindlimbs, wide feet, dense bones and elongated jaws studded with conical teeth. However, suggestions that it may have been a truly water-dwelling dinosaur were met with considerable opposition, in large part because the partial skeleton provided little to no evidence of the propulsive structure needed to move such a giant dinosaur through water.

Between 2015 and 2019, Ibrahim's team recovered many more fossils of the skeleton, including a remarkably complete, fin-like tail capable of extensive lateral movement and characterized by extremely long spines.

After preparing all of the fossils, the team used photogrammetry to digitally capture the anatomy of the tail.

To quantitatively assess the performance of the tail, a team of Harvard researchers made a flexible model and attached it to a robotic system that mimics swimming movements. They then compared the swimming performance of the model Spinosaurus tail to model tails from other animals, including crocodiles, newts and other dinosaurs. The results were fully consistent with the idea of a truly water-dwelling, tail-propelled, "river monster."

"This discovery is the nail in the coffin for the idea that non-avian dinosaurs never invaded the aquatic realm," said Ibrahim. "This dinosaur was actively pursuing prey in the water column, not just standing in shallow waters waiting for fish to swim by. It probably spent most of its life in the water." The discovery also points to the possibility of a persistent and widespread invasion of aquatic habitats by relatives of Spinosaurus.

"This new discovery changes our current understanding of dinosaurs and reflects Dr. Ibrahim's boundless curiosity and dedication to uncovering the secrets of the Sahara's dinosaurs," said Alex Moen, vice president of explorer programs at the National Geographic Society. "His work is at the nexus of science and exploration, and embodies the unique role National Geographic has in illuminating the wonder of our world."

Today, all of the original bones found throughout the project are housed at the University of Casablanca in Morocco. For Professor Samir Zouhri, capacity and infrastructure building in North Africa was a major goal of this research project.

"In the past, Moroccan fossils like this one would inevitably end up in collections in Europe, Asia or the United States," he stated. "Now we have the best collection of Kem Kem fossils right here in Morocco, including the most complete predatory dinosaur from the Cretaceous of mainland Africa. This is a game changer."

A new survey of U.S. primary care physicians from researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that nearly one-third, 32.9 percent, do not think treating opioid use disorder with medication is any more effective than treatment without medication.

The study also found that only one-fifth, 20.2 percent, of U.S. primary care physicians have interest in treating a patient with opioid use disorder.

The study, published online April 21 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, suggests that despite efforts to expand treatment for opioid use disorder with medication, some physicians in primary care settings remain reluctant to support medication as a treatment option.

This reluctance contrasts with research that shows that treatment with one of the three FDA-approved medications for opioid use disorder--methadone, buprenorphine, or naltrexone--is far more effective at helping people recover and preventing overdose death than approaches that do not use medication.

"Expanding treatment for patients with opioid use disorder is a public health priority," says Beth McGinty, PhD, associate professor in the Bloomberg School's Department of Health Policy and Management and the paper's lead author. "Primary care physicians present an important opportunity to address the huge gaps in treatment for opioid use disorder in the U.S. It is concerning that so many primary care physicians do not view medication as effective, despite strong research evidence and clinical guidelines emphasizing that treatment with medication saves lives."

There are an estimated 2.1 million people in the U.S. with an opioid use disorder. Recent studies have shown almost two-thirds of individuals with opioid use disorder do not receive any treatment.

For the survey, the researchers fielded a survey in February 2019 to 1,000 randomly selected primary care physicians in the U.S. using the American Medical Association Physician Masterfile, a database of all U.S. licensed physicians.

From the sample, researchers identified 688 eligible physicians, including actively practicing family, internal, or general medicine practitioners. Physicians were mailed a survey, instructions for return, and a $2 dollar cash incentive. Survey questions measured perceived effectiveness of opioid use disorder medication, prescribing practices for medication, and support for policies related to treating opioid use disorder.

The analysis, based on 361 survey responses, found low support for policies that remove prescription barriers for physicians in office settings. Currently physicians in non-hospital settings who want to prescribe buprenorphine to treat opioid use disorder must file paperwork for authorization with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAHMSA), and methadone treatment is only available in specialty clinics. Nearly half of respondents, 47.7 percent, supported allowing methadone to be prescribed in primary care settings, and only 38 percent supported policies around eliminating the waiver requirement.

"There are proposals out there to change policies to make it easier for primary care physicians to prescribe medications to treat opioid use disorder," says McGinty. "Yet we found that the majority of primary care physicians do not support these policies."

More than three-fourths of respondents (77.5 percent) thought buprenorphine was the most effective medication as compared to methadone (62.1 percent) and injectable, extended-release naltrexone (51.4 percent). Only 7.6 percent of physicians reported ever prescribing buprenorphine and even less (4 percent) reported prescribing naltrexone.

Most respondents (81.8 percent) supported increasing insurance coverage to cover treatment for opioid use disorder medication and 76.4 percent supported increasing government investment in medication-assisted treatment.

COLUMBIA, Mo. - Nursing home residents are often cared for by a variety of health care professionals, including licensed nursing staff. Transfers to a hospital can result from multiple factors, such as recurrent falls or medication mismanagement.

Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have found that providing advanced practice registered nurses with a multidisciplinary support team can help drastically reduce avoidable hospitalizations for nursing home residents.

Amy Vogelsmeier and Lori Popejoy, associate professors in the MU Sinclair School of Nursing, co-led the practice component of the Missouri Quality Initiative, a program that embedded full time advanced practice registered nurses in nursing homes with the goal to reduce avoidable hospitalizations. The support team consisted of clinical experts in nursing home care that support the work of the advanced practice registered nurses.

This team, including highly trained nurses, a social worker, medical director and health information coordinator, mentored the advanced practice registered nurses in their role and supported efforts of the nursing home leaders by providing feedback reports. Serving in 16 nursing homes throughout the Midwest with higher hospitalization rates than the national average, the program has resulted in a 30% reduction in hospital admissions since 2012.

"The support team influences care delivery by coaching the advanced practice registered nurses to in turn coach and mentor nursing home staff to identify when patients are getting ill and then ensuring the proper resources are in place to allow the patients to be cared for at the nursing home instead of sending them to a hospital," Vogelsmeier said. "By identifying patterns that contribute to hospitalizations, the support team of clinical experts can enhance the advanced practice registered nurses' ability to elevate the quality of care and ultimately improve health outcomes."

In addition to recognizing patterns that lead to hospitalizations, the support team provides best practices in areas like fall risk management, difficult discussions near end of life and ensuring that high risk medications are used appropriately. These practices can then be translated to other nursing homes nationwide, resulting in reduced hospitalizations.

"The support team is helping the advanced practice registered nurses put systems in place to facilitate staff growth and development at the nursing home so they can manage care appropriately 24 hours a day," Popejoy said. "Whether it's the physicians, nurses, nursing assistants, nursing home administrators, staff development coordinators or directors of nursing, none of us are as smart as all of us."

"Reducing Avoidable Hospitalizations for Nursing Home Residents: Role of the Missouri Quality Initiative Intervention Support Team" was recently published in Journal of Nursing Care Quality. Funding was provided by The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation Center.

Steady hands and uninterrupted, sharp vision are critical when performing surgery on delicate structures like the brain or hair-thin blood vessels. While surgical cameras have improved what surgeons see during operative procedures, the "steady hand" remains to be enhanced -- new surgical technologies, including sophisticated surgeon-guided robotic hands, cannot prevent accidental injuries when operating close to fragile tissue.

In a new study published in the January issue of the journal Scientific Reports, researchers at Texas A&M University show that by delivering small, yet perceptible buzzes of electrical currents to fingertips, users can be given an accurate perception of distance to contact. This insight enabled users to control their robotic fingers precisely enough to gently land on fragile surfaces.

The researchers said that this technique might be an effective way to help surgeons reduce inadvertent injuries during robot-assisted operative procedures.

"One of the challenges with robotic fingers is ensuring that they can be controlled precisely enough to softly land on biological tissue," said Hangue Park, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "With our design, surgeons will be able to get an intuitive sense of how far their robotic fingers are from contact, information they can then use to touch fragile structures with just the right amount of force."

Robot-assisted surgical systems, also known as telerobotic surgical systems, are physical extensions of a surgeon. By controlling robotic fingers with movements of their own fingers, surgeons can perform intricate procedures remotely, thus expanding the number of patients that they can provide medical attention. Also, the tiny size of the robotic fingers means that surgeries are possible with much smaller incisions since surgeons need not make large cuts to accommodate for their hands in the patient's body during operations.

To move their robotic fingers precisely, surgeons rely on live streaming of visual information from cameras fitted on telerobotic arms. Thus, they look into monitors to match their finger movements with those of the telerobotic fingers. In this way, they know where their robotic fingers are in space and how close these fingers are to each other.

However, Park noted that just visual information is not enough to guide fine finger movements, which is critical when the fingers are in the close vicinity of the brain or other delicate tissue.

"Surgeons can only know how far apart their actual fingers are from each other indirectly, that is, by looking at where their robotic fingers are relative to each other on a monitor," Park said. "This roundabout view diminishes their sense of how far apart their actual fingers are from each other, which then affects how they control their robotic fingers."

To address this problem, Park and his team came up with an alternate way to deliver distance information that is independent of visual feedback. By passing different frequencies of electrical currents onto fingertips via gloves fitted with stimulation probes, the researchers were able to train users to associate the frequency of current pulses with distance, that is, increasing current frequencies indicated the closing distance from a test object. They then compared if users receiving current stimulation along with visual information about closing distance on their monitors did better at estimating proximity than those who received visual information alone.

Park and his team also tailored their technology according to the user's sensitivity to electrical current frequencies. In other words, if a user was sensitive to a wider range of current frequencies, the distance information was delivered with smaller steps of increasing currents to maximize the accuracy of proximity estimation.

The researchers found that users receiving electrical pulses were more aware of the proximity to underlying surfaces and could lower their force of contact by around 70%, performing much better than the other group. Overall, they observed that proximity information delivered through mild electric pulses was about three times more effective than the visual information alone.

Park said their novel approach has the potential to significantly increase maneuverability during surgery while minimizing risks of unintended tissue damage. He also said their technique would add little to the existing mental load of surgeons during operative procedures.

"Our goal was to come up with a solution that would improve the accuracy in proximity estimation without increasing the burden of active thinking needed for this task," he said. "When our technique is ready for use in surgical settings, physicians will be able to intuitively know how far their robotic fingers are from underlying structures, which means that they can keep their active focus on optimizing the surgical outcome of their patients."

Polyurethanes (PUs) are used in many products, such as mattresses, insulation, footwear and construction materials. Wear and replacement of these products generates lots of waste and creates demand for new PUs, often made from toxic building blocks. A few methods have attempted to recycle PU waste, but these techniques result in lower-value products. Now, researchers report in ACS Central Science a way to recycle used PU into equivalent or even higher-value items.

Conventional PU can't be recycled simply by heating because it consists of polymer networks held together by strong chemical bonds that don't flow when heated. Instead, PU can only be downcycled into less useful materials. Some research groups have made new types of PU with crosslinks that can be broken and reformed in response to a stimulus, allowing it to be recycled. But this approach would require the industry to commercialize new starting materials, and it wouldn't address the issue of conventional waste lingering in landfills. Also, these methods haven't been tested on foams, the form in which most PU is used in products. Another research group developed a way to recycle conventional polyester or modified PU by soaking it in a catalyst solution that enabled the material to be re-shaped into similar- or higher-valued products. William Dichtel and colleagues wanted to explore this concept further by using different crosslink exchange chemistry and coupling it with industrially relevant processing techniques to recycle conventional PU foams into rubber and hard plastic.

To do this, the team started by grinding up PU foam or film and mixing the particles in a catalyst solution. After drying, the particles were compression molded to form new films. Compression molded films formed good-quality products, but foam treated in this way produced cracked and inhomogeneous materials. The researchers solved this problem by developing a twin-screw extrusion process that improved mixing and air removal in recycled foams, compared to the compression molding approach. They say this new method could be used for continuous recycling of the large amounts of PU waste currently landfilled or newly produced.

EVANSTON, Ill. -- Researchers have developed a new method for upcycling polyurethane foams, the spongy material found in mattresses, insulation, furniture cushions and shoes.

This process, developed by researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Minnesota, first involves mixing postconsumer polyurethane foam waste with a catalyst solution that allows the foam to become malleable. Next, the method uses a "twin-screw" extrusion process that both removes air from the foam to create a new material in the shape of a hard, durable plastic or soft, flexible film as well as remolds the material.

This allows foam waste to be processed into higher quality rubbers and hard plastics for use in shoe cushioning, watch wristbands, hard durable wheels (for shopping carts and skateboards) and in automotive applications, such as bumpers.

"Polyurethane foam waste has historically been landfilled and burned or downcycled for use in carpeting," said Northwestern's William Dichtel, who co-led the research. "Our latest work effectively removes air from polyurethane foams and remolds them into any shape. This could pave the way for industry to begin recycling polyurethane foam waste for many relevant applications."

The research will be published April 29 in the journal ACS Central Science.

Dichtel is the Robert L. Letsinger Professor of Chemistry in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He co-led the research with Christopher Ellison, an associate professor of chemical engineering and materials science at the University of Minnesota.

Often made from toxic building blocks, polyurethane foam is a stubborn material that frequently ends up at the bottom of landfills. While other types of plastics can be melted down and recycled, polyurethane foam's chemical bonds are so strong that it does not melt -- even in extreme heat. At best, people can shred it into synthetic fibers, which can then be downcycled into carpet and brushes.

Other upcycling efforts have compressed the foam to remove its air, but this resulted in cracked or unevenly blended materials. Dichtel and Ellison's approach uses two intermeshing, co-rotating screws to simultaneously mix and remold the foam. This improved mixing and air removal.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can provide an effective way of supporting the development of the next generation of high-performance rechargeable batteries, according to research led by the University of Birmingham.

The technique, which was developed to detect the movement and deposition of sodium metal ions within a sodium battery, will enable faster evaluation of new battery materials, and help to accelerate this type of battery's route to market.

Sodium batteries are widely recognised as a promising candidate to replace lithium ion batteries, currently widely used in devices such as portable electronics and electric vehicles. Several of the materials required to produce lithium ion batteries are critical or strategic elements and, therefore, researchers are working to develop alternative and more sustainable technologies.

Although sodium appears to have many of the properties required to produce an efficient battery, there are challenges in optimising the performance. Key amongst these is understanding how the sodium behaves inside the battery as it goes through its charging and discharging cycle, enabling the points of failure and degradation mechanisms to be identified.

A team, led by Dr Melanie Britton in the University of Birmingham's School of Chemistry, has developed a technique, with researchers from Nottingham University, that uses MRI scanning to monitor how the sodium performs in operando.

The research team also included scientists from the Energy materials group in the University of Birmingham's School of Metallurgy and Materials, and from Imperial College London. Their results are published in Nature Communications.

This imaging technique will enable scientists to understand how the sodium behaves as it interacts with different anode and cathode materials. They will also be able to monitor the growth of dendrites - branch-like structures that can grow inside the battery over time and cause it to fail, or even catch fire.

"Because the battery is a sealed cell, when it goes wrong it can be hard to see what the fault is," explains Dr Britton. "Taking the battery apart introduces internal changes that make it hard to see what the original flaw was or where it occurred. But using the MRI technique we've developed, we can actually see what's going on inside the battery while it is operational, giving us unprecedented insights into how the sodium behaves."

This technique gives us information into the change within the battery components during operation of a sodium ion battery, which are currently not available to us through other techniques. This will enable us to identify methods for detecting failure mechanisms as they happen, giving us insights into how to manufacture longer life and higher performing batteries.

The techniques used by the team were first designed in a collaboration with researchers at the Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre at University of Nottingham which was funded by the Birmingham-Nottingham Strategic Collaboration Fund. This project aimed to develop MRI scanning of sodium isotopes as a medical imaging technique and the team were able to adapt these protocols for use in battery imaging. The development of novel materials and analytical characterisation is a primary focus of the Birmingham Centre for Energy Storage and Birmingham Centre for Critical Elements and Strategic Materials within the Birmingham Energy Institute.

Madison, WI, April 28, 2020 - For the first time, a new publication by the USDA Forest Service delivers an overview of the status and trends of greenhouse gas emissions and removals from forest land, woodlands, hardwood products, and urban trees nationally for 49 U.S. states.

"This year, we are delivering a report that is 49 times more useful than it was a year ago," said Grant Domke, a research forester with Forest Inventory and Analysis in the Forest Service's Northern Research Station. "From forest managers to policy makers, data on the role of forests in the carbon cycle is critical to decisions that will shape the future of the Nation's forests."

Titled "Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Removals from Forest Land, Woodlands, and Urban Trees in the United States, 1990-2018," the resource update is available online through the Forest Service's Northern Research Station at: https://doi.org/10.2737/FS-RU-227.

The estimates of greenhouse gas emissions and removals were developed by Forest Service scientists as part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) National Greenhouse Gas Report, which was released on April 13.

Estimates include the movement of carbon from the atmosphere into living trees, dead wood and soil as well as emissions from forest fires. The only state not included in the report is Hawaii, where data were not available.

The report revealed that collectively, forested land, harvested wood products, and urban trees accounted for more than 95% of what is called the land carbon sink, how carbon is stored in natural systems, in the US. The carbon removed from the atmosphere and stored in forests, harvested wood, and urban trees is equal to more than 11% of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States every year between 1990 and 2018.

"The Forest Inventory and Analysis Program has served states for 90 years by producing reliable statistics on forest trends," said Tony Ferguson, Director of two Forest Service research organizations, the Northern Research Station and the Forest Products Laboratory. "This year marks another evolution in our service to states as we expand the availability of data on forests and carbon storage."

Tuning in to the signature 'whistles' of dolphins could prove a game-changer in being able to accurately track the movements of this much-loved protected species.

Researchers from Edith Cowan University (ECU) and Curtin University in Australia have moved an important step closer to using sound rather than sight to track individual dolphin activity.

Their study, which has potential implications for dolphin communities around the world, investigated whether there was a way to attribute unique whistles to individual bottlenose dolphins living in Western Australia's Swan River.

It is the first time researchers have attempted acoustic tracking dolphins in the Swan River, which is a complicated marine ecosystem due to its high volume of activity and noise.

ECU researcher Associate Professor Chandra Salgado Kent said the project could have significant implications for dolphin conservation.

"Our ultimate aim is to track the movements of individual dolphins through underwater acoustic recorders," Professor Salgado Kent said.

"Until now researchers around the world have relied on laborious and expensive visual surveys on boats to track individual dolphins.

"These surveys can only be conducted during the day and rely on photographing the unique nicks and notches in dorsal fins when they come to the surface.

"We aimed to design a new approach to monitor individual dolphin activity through matching unique sounds, known as signature whistles, to individual dolphins."

A challenging process

From April to September 2013 the researchers systemically monitored an area within the eastern part of the Fremantle Inner Harbour where the Swan River narrows.

Acoustic recordings were made throughout all observation times with handheld hydrophones deployed over the side of the small craft jetty lowered to 1.5m depth.

More than 500 whistles were matched to dolphin photos over the period of the study.

Curtin University Professor Christine Erbe said the process presented some unique challenges.

"Dolphins are social creatures and very frequently seen in groups, which makes the process of matching the whistles to particular individuals very challenging," she said.

"Based on the presence and absence of dolphins when whistles were recorded, most whistle types were narrowed down to a range of possible dolphins that could have produced it.

"Our next goal will be to narrow this down to individuals."

Researchers from Higher School of Theoretical Mechanics of Peter the Great St.Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU) and Tel Aviv University proposed a new approach to improve the efficiency of mathematical modeling of the processes in materials at the nanoscale. It is essential for the further development of nanotechnology. The results are presented in an article published in the Q1 journal Mechanics Research Communications.

The scientists investigated single-layer molybdenum disulfide (SLMoS2). This is a two-dimensional material with a large number of promising applications, such as miniature sensors, nanodevices, etc. Usually, methods of computational mechanics are used to design engineering devices. However, on a nanoscale, such methods are either not valid or too time-consuming. Researchers proposed to combine the atoms of SLMoS2 into the imaginary rigid grains.

"The laws of interaction between the grains were fitted to fulfill the elastic properties of the original crystal lattice. The number of bonds between the grains is much smaller than those between the atoms of the same part of a crystal lattice. As a result, the calculations with grains are much faster than with atoms, " said the alumni of St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, Dr. Igor Berinskii, senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University, and Dr. Artem Panchenko, postdoctoral researcher at TAU.

Dr. Ekaterina Podolskaya, associate professor at the Higher School of Theoretical Mechanics SPbPU, adds: "With our method, the calculations became simpler, which gives a possibility to predict the mechanical response to tension and to study its failure mechanism. This is important for further applications of this material in nanoengineering".

In the next series of computational experiments, the scientific group plans to introduce the deformable grains. It will help to calculate correctly not only small but also large deformations in the material. According to researchers, the proposed approach can be further used for other laws of atomic interaction and different types of grains.

Researchers in China have engineered a microbe that shows promise as the foundation of an efficient way to break down polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a common plastic fiber used to manufacture clothing and disposable consumer products.

The researchers published their findings in Microbial Biotechnology on April 28, 2020.

The research team at Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led by Associate Professor LIU Yajun, Ph.D., aimed to create a strain of the bacteria called Clostridium thermocellum (or C. thermocellum) that would degrade PET more efficiently than current industry bio-methods. They had their sights set on C. thermocellum because of its potential to thrive in hot, oxygen-free environments.

The engineered microbes can also break down plant-based fibers, the QIBEBT research team found.

"Because C. thermocellum can naturally degrade cellulose efficiently, the C. thermocellum-based strategy is expected to demonstrate great potential for application in the bio-recycling of mixed textile waste containing both cellulose and polyester fractions," LIU said.

The global economy is currently heavily reliant on PET for a range of products. About 70 percent of fibers used in producing clothing contain PET, and most consumer packaging products and drink bottles are produced from PET. Non-recycled PET is produced from fossil fuels, which are in part to blame for human-driven climate change.

Heat-friendly microbes to break down PET faster than their moderate-temperature counterparts, Prof. LIU said. First, her team obtained microbes that would thrive above 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit) - a temperature ideal for degrading PET into its component compounds. They decided to use C. thermocellum, which in nature are found inside leaf and branch compost piles.

The research team submerged a thin sample of PET in a solution rich with C. thermocellum. The test vials were kept at 60 degrees Celsius for 14 days, at which point about two-thirds of the PET had broken down into what petrochemical engineers call "feedstocks" - the hydrocarbon-based compounds used to create a myriad of plastic and other products.

Recycling facilities that biodegrade PET typically deploy microbes that require oxygen and lower temperatures, making the mechanics of the process more energy-intensive and expensive.

Existing whole-cell biocatalysis processes to degrade PET are also slower than the process examined in the study, in which about two-thirds of the tested PET sample was broken down in two weeks. Current processes take about six weeks to completely degrade PET. They require energy-intensive inputs such as huge electric motors to agitate the recycling vessels and inject air bubbles to maintain temperature and oxygen levels.

Humankind has produced over 8300 million metric tons of plastics since 1950. Recycling programs have already diverted hundreds of millions of tons of consumer waste away from landfills, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But as of 2017, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported that only about 30 percent of plastic waste was recycled, with vast quantities still going into landfills and dumped at sea.

"If further refined and adopted globally, this new process has the potential to save the PET recycling energy time and money, as well as divert a greater percentage of PET away from landfills and oceans," LIU said.

The microscale reentrant-honeycomb shaped, graphene-based electrode is characterized by an accordion-like structural stretchability. A stretchable gel electrolyte and stretchable separator are also developed for all-component stretchable full cells, applying for future stretchable devices.

A Korean research team has developed a lithium-ion battery that is flexible enough to be stretched. Dr. Jeong Gon Son's research team at the Photo-Electronic Hybrids Research Center at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) announced that they had constructed a high-capacity, stretchable lithium-ion battery. The battery was developed by fabricating a structurally stretchable electrode consisting solely of electrode materials and then assembling with stretchable gel electrolyte and stretchable packaging.

Rapid technological advancements in the electronics industry have led to a fast-growing market for high-performance wearable devices, such as smart bands and body-implantable electronic devices, such as pacemakers. These advancements have considerably increased the need for energy storage devices to be designed in flexible and stretchable forms that mimic human skin and organs.

However, it is very difficult to impart the stretchability to the battery because the solid inorganic electrode material occupies most of the volume, and other components such as current collectors and separators must also be made stretchable. In addition, the problem of liquid electrolyte leakage under deformation also should be solved. , and the problem of leaking the liquid electrolyte must also be solved.

In order to address these problems, Dr. Jeong Gon Son's research team at KIST focused on creating an accordion-like micro-structure, which gives structural stretchability to non-stretchable materials, and thus constructed a micro-inwardly curved electrode framework in a honeycomb shape. The inwardly protruded honeycomb framwork consisted of atom-thick graphene, which serves as an curtain, and carbon nanotubes, which formed a nano-size rope. The honeycomb-shaped composite framework, made of active materials, graphene, and carbon nanotubes, was inwardly protruded like an accordion using a radial compression process, resembling the rolling of Korean rice rolls (gimbap), which resulted in the creation of stretchable properties.

The electrodes developed by the research team do not contain any materials typically used for stretchability, such as rubber, that do not facilitate energy storage. All of the materials used by the research team in their newly developed battery are fully utilized in energy storage and charge transport. In fact, the stretchable battery created by the team showed an energy storage capacity (5.05 mAh/cm2) that is as high as existing non-stretchable batteries.

The KIST newly introduced stretchable gel electrolytes and stretchable packaging materials, that block air and moisture, and keep the electrolytes from leaking. The resulting stretchable battery showed a high areal capacity of 5.05 mAh?cm?2, superior electrochemical performance up to 50% strain under repeated (up to 500) stretch-release cycles and long-term stability of 95.7% after 100 cycles in air conditions.

Dr. Jeong Gon Son at KIST said, "The stretchable lithium-ion battery developed through this research is expected to present a new paradigm in term of stretchable energy storage systems for the further development of wearable and body-implantable electronic devices."

When a dead body is found, one of the first things a forensic pathologist tries to do is estimate the time of death. There are several ways to do this, including measuring body temperature or observing insect activity, but these methods don't always work for corpses found in water. Now, researchers are reporting a mouse study in ACS' Journal of Proteome Research showing that certain proteins in bones could be used for this determination.

An accurate estimate of when someone died can help investigators better understand what happened to the person and can help them identify possible murder suspects, if foul play was involved. However, determining the length of time a body has been underwater, or the post-mortem submerged interval (PMSI), can be very challenging. One way is to examine the decomposition stage of several areas of the body, but factors like water salinity, depth, tides, temperature, presence of bacteria and scavengers can make PMSI estimation difficult. But bones are stronger than soft tissues, and they lie deep within the body, so the proteins within them might be shielded from some of these effects. So, Noemi Procopio and colleagues wondered if monitoring the levels of certain proteins in bones could reveal the amount of time that a mouse's corpse is underwater, and also whether different types of water mattered. 

To find out, the researchers placed fresh mouse carcasses in bottles of tap water, saltwater, pond water or chlorinated water. After a PMSI of 1 or 3 weeks, the team collected the tibia, or lower leg bones, from the corpses, extracted the proteins and analyzed them by mass spectrometry. The researchers found that the time since submersion had a greater effect on protein levels than the different types of water. In particular, a protein called fructose-bisphosphate aldolase A decreased in bone with increasing PMSI. In pond water, a protein called fetuin-A was more likely to undergo a chemical modification, called deamidation, than in the other types of water, which could help reveal if a body was once submerged in pond water and then moved. These and other potential biomarkers identified in the study could be useful for PMSI estimation in different aquatic environments, the researchers say.