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Focusing on urbanization as a key driver of environmental change in the 21st century, researchers at Princeton University have created a framework to understand and compare cities' food systems and their effects on climate change, water use and land use. The research will allow planners to estimate the impact of a city's food system and evaluate policy actions.

"Our approach reveals differences between urban food systems both within and across countries," said co-author Anu Ramaswami, the Sanjay Swani '87 Professor of India Studies and a professor of civil and environmental engineering. "Despite these differences, we now have a common methodology to identify which policies would result in what levels of environmental mitigation."

The study analyzed the greenhouse gas emissions, water use and land use of food systems for two metropolitan areas in India, Delhi and Pondicherry; and two in the United States, New York and Minneapolis. The results highlight the impacts of differences in meat consumption between Indian and U.S. cities, as well as differences in food processing. Comparing the two Indian cities shows contrasts in diets, supply chains and local production levels.

In general, dietary changes and waste management emerged as the most effective ways to shrink cities' food footprints, with specific beneficial changes differing among cities, the researchers reported in a paper published Jan. 30 in the Journal of Industrial Ecology. Ramaswami co-wrote the study with Dana Boyer, research and development manager in the Sustainable Urban Infrastructure Systems Lab in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Princeton Environmental Institute.

In coming decades, cities, particularly in the developing world, are expected to experience unprecedented growth. For instance, the United Nations projects that India will add more than 400 million urban dwellers by 2050.

The study is part of an ongoing effort by Ramaswami and colleagues to advance research and practice in urban sustainability. Ramaswami directs the National Science Foundation-supported Sustainable Healthy Cities Network, a collaboration of university researchers with industry and policy partners. In a recent commentary, Ramaswami outlined seven types of infrastructure, including food systems, that cities should consider when looking to improve outcomes for the environment as well as for human health, equity and well-being.

In the Industrial Ecology paper, the researchers selected the four cities to provide contrasts in population size, infrastructure, diet and other characteristics, with the aim of creating a generalizable approach. In addition to dietary changes and waste management, the study assessed the potential footprint reductions of policies to promote urban agriculture or change food preparation methods.

In New York and Minneapolis, the study showed that changing residents' diets by replacing all meat consumption with lentils and legumes could reduce land use by more than half, and could also cut greenhouse gas emissions by 34% and water use by as much as 24%. Even replacing beef and mutton with poultry and pork could achieve nearly the same footprint reduction. While these are idealized scenarios that involve 100% implementation, they can give policymakers a starting point for encouraging meaningful changes, said Boyer.

In India, meat consumption is far lower than in the United States -- an annual average of just 4 kilograms (8.8 pounds) per person in Delhi and 16 kilograms (35 pounds) in Pondicherry, compared with the U.S. average of approximately 59 kilograms (130 pounds). However, in India rice is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and land use. The study showed that switching from rice to wheat could decrease both Delhi's and Pondicherry's food footprint.

Improving food waste management could have benefits in all four cities, although the most useful ways to reduce waste differed based on the nature of waste accumulation in the respective countries, the researchers found. In the United States, eliminating avoidable (edible) household food waste could reduce both water and land use by about 18% in Minneapolis and 11% in New York, and could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 10% in both cities. In India, however, pre-consumer food waste is a much larger problem, as infrastructures for harvesting, transportation and food storage are less efficient. Tackling these issues has the greatest potential to reduce the environmental impacts of India's food systems.

Notably, the study found that increasing urban agriculture, whether through conventional farming or vertical farming techniques, would have negligible environmental impacts. This is because food transport accounts for at most 10% of food-related greenhouse gas emissions in New York, Minneapolis and Delhi, and much less in Pondicherry, which is surrounded by agricultural production and processing industries.

"Many cities are holding up urban agriculture as an approach to decreasing the [greenhouse gas] emissions in their food system," said Boyer. "This is not to negate the other benefits that it might have in terms of education or exercise or just having an enjoyable connection with your food. But our study really puts the emphasis on cities figuring out ways to address diet change, and to some extent food waste management if they are to make meaningful reduction to their food system emissions."

Looking at the environmental footprints of entire food systems also reveals the importance of food processing, which accounts for about 20% of food system greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. cities. In Indian cities, the emissions associated with food processing are relatively negligible, but some policymakers have proposed increasing food processing as a way to decrease food waste. The benefits of decreasing waste could be offset by the rise in emissions from the energy used for food processing.

"The indicators and approach in this study are exciting in that they should be largely replicable, and provide a feasible approach to addressing major gaps in data availability -- and also because using this approach enables creation of comparable data across diverse cities and contexts," said Roni Neff, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who was not involved in the study. "From the practice side, creating a tool to enable cities to perform such modeling in their own context would be a valuable addition, and could also contribute to development of a large database of city-level data."

Boyer and Ramaswami also plan to examine the ease of implementation of policy options. For example, in Pondicherry switching diets from rice to wheat could achieve about the same reduction in land use as reducing pre-consumer food waste, but the latter might be more feasible than the former. In U.S. cities, on the other hand, lowering meat consumption might be more realistic than curbing food waste.

"What I think is really challenging, but also useful, in the United States is just how quickly we are into the newest [food] fad," said Boyer, whereas in India even a shift from white rice to brown rice "can have a really significant impact on someone's everyday life. Food is much more ingrained in the cultural fabric and food traditionally has much more meaning beyond just taste and fad."

Ramaswami and Boyer came to Princeton in 2019 from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where they are continuing a partnership with the city government to pilot a food action plan aimed at improving environmental sustainability and public health. The project combines research with community engagement.

"Our research gives us a method to inform the environmental aspects of urban food system actions, but the food system is very multifaceted, said Boyer. "There's cultural aspects, there's health aspects, equity considerations. So, this is one tool that we can pair with other tools to inform a holistic food action plan."

Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have created a new, rubber-like material with a unique set of properties, which could act as a replacement for human tissue in medical procedures. The material has the potential to make a big difference to many people's lives. The research was recently published in the highly regarded scientific journal ACS Nano.

In the development of medical technology products, there is a great demand for new naturalistic materials suitable for integration with the body. Introducing materials into the body comes with many risks, such as serious infections, among other things. Many of the substances used today, such as Botox, are very toxic. There is a need for new, more adaptable materials.

In the new study, the Chalmers researchers developed a material consisting solely of components that have already been shown to work well in the body.

The foundation of the material is the same as plexiglass, a material which is common in medical technology applications. Through redesigning its makeup, and through a process called nanostructuring, they gave the newly patented material a unique combination of properties. The researchers' initial intention was to produce a hard bone-like material, but they were met with surprising results.

"We were really surprised that the material turned to be very soft, flexible and extremely elastic. It would not work as a bone replacement material, we concluded. But the new and unexpected properties made our discovery just as exciting," says Anand Kumar Rajasekharan, PhD in Materials Science and one of the researchers behind the study.

The results showed that the new rubber-like material may be appropriate for many applications which require an uncommon combination of properties - high elasticity, easy processability, and suitability for medical uses.

"The first application we are looking at now is urinary catheters. The material can be constructed in such a way that prevents bacteria from growing on the surface, meaning it is very well suited for medical uses," says Martin Andersson, research leader for the study and Professor of Chemistry at Chalmers.

The structure of the new nano-rubber material allows its surface to be treated so that it becomes antibacterial, in a natural, non-toxic way. This is achieved by sticking antimicrobial peptides - small proteins which are part of our innate immune system - onto its surface. This can help reduce the need for antibiotics, an important contribution to the fight against growing antibiotic resistance.

Because the new material can be injected and inserted via keyhole surgery, it can also help reduce the need for drastic surgery and operations to rebuild parts of the body. The material can be injected via a standard cannula as a viscous fluid, so that it forms its own elastic structures within the body. Or, the material can also be 3D printed into specific structures as required.

"There are many diseases where the cartilage breaks down and friction results between bones, causing great pain for the affected person. This material could potentially act as a replacement in those cases," Martin Andersson continues.

A further advantage of the material is that it contains three-dimensionally ordered nanopores. This means it can be loaded with medicine, for various therapeutic purposes such as improving healing and reducing inflammation. This allows for localised treatment, avoiding, for example, having to treat the entire body with drugs, something that could help reduce problems associated with side effects. Since it is non-toxic, it also works well as a filler - the researchers see plastic surgery therefore as another very interesting potential area of application for the new material.

"I am now working full time with our newly founded company, Amferia, to get the research out to industry. I have been pleased to see a lot of real interest in our material. It's promising in terms of achieving our goal, which is to provide real societal benefit," Anand concludes.

Read the study, "Tough Ordered Mesoporous Elastomeric Biomaterials Formed at Ambient Conditions" in the scientific journal ACS Nano.

The path of the research to societal benefit and commercialisation, through start-up company Amferia and Chalmers Ventures

In order for the discovery of the new material to be useful and commercialised, the researchers patented their innovation before the study was published. The patent is owned by start-up company Amferia, which was founded by Martin Andersson and Anand Kumar Rajasekharan, two of the researchers behind the study, as well as researcher Saba Atefyekta who recently completed a PhD in Materials Science at Chalmers. Anand is now CEO of Amferia and will drive the application of the new material and development of the company.

Amferia has previously been noted for an antibacterial wound patch developed by the same team. Amferia now has the innovation of both the new nano-rubber and the antibacterial wound patch. The development of the company and the innovations' path to making profit are now being carried out in collaboration with Chalmers Ventures, a subsidiary of Chalmers University of Technology.

Even a limited nuclear war could have dangerous effects far beyond the region that is fatally hit. It would result in global cooling that substantially reduces agricultural production in the world's main breadbasket regions, from the US, to Europe, Russia, and China. The particular effect on food security worldwide including trade responses has now for the first time been revealed by an international team of scientists in a study based on advanced computer simulations. The sudden temperature reduction would lead to a food system shock unprecedented in documented history. It would not undo long-term climate change from fossil fuels use, though - after about a decade of cooling, global warming would surge again.

"We now know that nuclear conflict would not just be a terrible tragedy in the region where it happens - it is also an underestimated risk for global food security," says Jonas Jaegermeyr at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the University of Chicago; lead-author of the study now published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We find severe losses in agricultural production, but importantly we also evaluate trade repercussions affecting local food availability. It turns out that major breadbasket regions would cut exports leaving countries worldwide short of supplies. A regional crisis would become global, because we all depend on the same climate system."

+++Soot from fires ignited by the bombs would partially block sunlight+++

As an example for a regional conflict, the scientists studied the implications of a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan using less than 1 percent of the worldwide nuclear arsenal. Fires ignited by the bombs would send large amounts of soot high up into the atmosphere where winds would rapidly distribute it around the globe. These particles would partially block sunlight from reaching Earth's surface, causing sudden cooling and changing weather patterns. For the injection of 5 million tons of smoke, climate models calculated global mean temperature drops of about 1.8 Celsius degrees (3.2 Fahrenheit degrees) and precipitation declines of 8 percent for at least five years - pushing Earth into a state substantially colder and drier. To put this into context, so far greenhouse gases from fossil fuels have warmed our planet by roughly 1 degree Celsius. Before this study, however, there has been very little understanding of how global agricultural systems would respond to cooling.

In the first year after the war, domestic reserves and global trade could largely buffer the food production loss, the researchers now show. By year four, grain stocks would virtually be depleted and the international trade systems would come to a halt. Continuing production losses therefore propagate from the breadbasket regions in the Northern Hemisphere to the often poorer populations of the Global South. Maize and wheat availability would shrink by at least 20 percent in more than 70 countries with about 1.3 billion people. "This is a surprisingly sharp response in view of the much larger conflict scenarios imaginable when it comes to nuclear war," says Jaegermeyr.

+++"More people could die outside the target areas due to famine"+++

"As horrible as the direct effects of nuclear weapons would be, more people could die outside the target areas due to famine, simply because of indirect climatic effects," says co-author Alan Robock at Rutgers University. "Nuclear proliferation continues, and there is a de facto nuclear arms race in South Asia. Investigating the global impacts of a nuclear war is therefore - unfortunately - not at all a Cold War issue."

The authors exclude India and Pakistan from their analyses, in order to avoid arbitrary assumptions when mixing up the direct and indirect effects of war. Under the assumption that food production in the two countries would drop essentially to zero, indirect global food shortages would be even worse. While the two countries' nuclear arsenals continue to grow both in number and weapon size, this study used the lower end of potential soot emission estimates.

"We ran an ensemble of six leading AgMIP global crop models for this study, and they all agree to a great deal on the signal. This shows how robust the simulations are," says co-author Cynthia Rosenzweig at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. She's a veteran pioneer of breakthrough agricultural model intercomparisons (AgMIP) which today are one important part of the larger Impacts Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP) coordinated by the Potsdam Institute. "Comparing different computer simulation models reduces uncertainties. Today, we can say with confidence that such a regional nuclear war would have adverse consequences for global food security for about a decade, unmatched in modern history."

The concept of nuclear winter--a years-long planetary freeze brought on by airborne soot generated by nuclear bombs--has been around for decades. But such speculations have been based largely on back-of-the-envelope calculations involving a total war between Russia and the United States. Now, a new multinational study incorporating the latest models of global climate, crop production and trade examines the possible effects of a less gargantuan but perhaps more likely exchange between two longtime nuclear-armed enemies: India and Pakistan. It suggests that even a limited war between the two would cause unprecedented planet-wide food shortages and probable starvation lasting more than a decade. The study appears this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Of an estimated 14,000 nuclear warheads worldwide, close to 95 percent belong to the United States and Russia. India and Pakistan are thought to have about 150 each. The study examines the potential effects if they were to each set off 50 Hiroshima-size bombs--less than 1 percent of the estimated world arsenal.

In addition to direct death and destruction, the authors say that firestorms following the bombings would launch some 5 million tons of soot toward the stratosphere. There, it would spread globally and remain, absorbing sunlight and lowering global mean temperatures by about 1.8 degrees C (3.25 F) for at least five years. The scientists project that this would in turn cause production of the world's four main cereal crops--maize, wheat, soybeans and rice--to plummet an average 11 percent over that period, with tapering effects lasting another five to 10 years.

"Even this regional, limited war would have devastating indirect implications worldwide," said Jonas Jägermeyr, a postdoctoral scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies who led the study. "It would exceed the largest famine in documented history."

According to the study, crops would be hardest hit in the northerly breadbasket regions of the United States, Canada, Europe, Russia and China. But paradoxically, southerly regions would suffer much more hunger. That is because many developed nations in the north produce huge surpluses, which are largely exported to nations in the Global South that are barely able to feed themselves. If these surpluses were to dry up, the effects would ripple out through the global trade system. The authors estimate that some 70 largely poor countries with a cumulative population of 1.3 billion people would then see food supplies drop more than 20 percent.

Some adverse effects on crops would come from shifts in precipitation and solar radiation, but the great majority would stem from drops in temperature, according to the study. Crops would suffer most in countries north of 30 degrees simply because temperatures there are lower and growing seasons shorter to begin with. Even modest declines in growing-season warmth could leave crops struggling to mature, and susceptible to deadly cold snaps. As a result, harvests of maize, the world's main cereal crop, could drop by nearly 20 percent in the United States, and an astonishing 50 percent in Russia. Wheat and soybeans, the second and third most important cereals, would also see steep declines. In southerly latitudes, rice might not suffer as badly, and cooler temperatures might even increase maize harvests in parts of South America and Africa. But this would do little to offset the much larger declines in other regions, according to the study.

Since many developed countries produce surpluses for export, their excess production and reserves might tide them over for at least a few years before shortages set in. But this would come at the expense of countries in the Global South. Developed nations almost certainly would impose export bans in order to protect their own populations, and by year four or five, many nations that today already struggle with malnutrition would see catastrophic drops in food availability. Among those the authors list as the hardest hit: Somalia, Niger, Rwanda, Honduras, Syria, Yemen and Bangladesh.

If nuclear weapons continue to exist, "they can be used with tragic consequences for the world," said study coauthor Alan Robock, a climatologist at Rutgers University who has long studied the potential effects of nuclear war. "As horrible as the direct effects of nuclear weapons would be, more people could die outside the target areas due to famine."

Previously, Jägermeyr has studied the potential effects of global warming on agriculture, which most scientists agree will suffer badly. But, he said, a sudden nuclear-caused cooling would hit food systems far worse. And, looking backward, the the effects on food availability would be four times worse than any previously recorded global agriculture upsets caused by droughts, floods, or volcanic eruptions, he said.

The study might be erring on the conservative side. For one, India and Pakistan may well have bombs far bigger than the ones the scientists use in their assumptions. For another, the study leaves India and Pakistan themselves out of the crop analyses, in order to avoid mixing up the direct effects of a war with the indirect ones. That aside, Jägermeyr said that one could reasonably assume that food production in the remnants of the two countries would drop essentially to zero. The scientists also did not factor in the possible effects of radioactive fallout, nor the probability that floating soot would cause the stratosphere to heat up at the same time the surface was cooling. This would in turn cause stratospheric ozone to dissipate, and similar to the effects of now-banned refrigerants, this would admit more ultraviolet rays to the earth's surface, damaging humans and agriculture even more.

Much attention has been focused recently on North Korea's nuclear program, and the potential for Iran or other countries to start up their own arsenals. But many experts have long regarded Pakistan and India as the most dangerous players, because of their history of near-continuous conflict over territory and other issues. India tested its first nuclear weapon in 1974, and when Pakistan followed in 1998, the stakes grew. The two countries have already had four full-scale conventional wars, in 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999, along with many substantial skirmishes in between. Recently, tensions over the disputed region of Kashmir have flared again.

"We're not saying a nuclear conflict is around the corner. But it is important to understand what could happen," said Jägermeyr.

The paper was coauthored by a total of 19 scientists from five countries, including three others from Goddard, which is affiliated with Columbia University's Earth Institute: Michael Puma, Alison Heslin and Cynthia Rosenzweig. Jägermeyr also has affiliations with the University of Chicago and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

A component of breast milk may help protect premature babies from developing sepsis, a fast-moving, life-threatening condition triggered by infection. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., have found -- in newborn mice -- that a molecule called epidermal growth factor in breast milk activates receptors on intestinal cells to keep dangerous gut bacteria from migrating into the bloodstream, where such microbes can prompt sepsis.

The researchers also found that breast milk with higher levels of this epidermal growth factor, especially from the earliest days of lactation following birth, is most effective in preventing dangerous bacteria from getting into the bloodstream.

The findings are published March 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Late-onset sepsis is a major problem in premature babies," said senior author Rodney D. Newberry, MD, a Washington University gastroenterologist and professor of medicine. "These findings give us a better understanding of one of the scenarios that triggers sepsis, and a potential new tool to combat this condition."

The study looked at late-onset sepsis, which strikes at least 72 hours after a baby is born and up to 60 days after birth and accounts for 26% of all deaths in infants born prematurely. About 10% of infants born preterm experience late-onset sepsis, and 30% to 50% of those who develop the infections die. Much of the focus on preventing late-onset sepsis relies on improving aseptic techniques, such as making sure a baby's skin is bacteria free and that intravenous lines and other life-saving tubes don't harbor potentially deadly bacteria.

"The idea, initially, was that these infants became septic from their intravenous lines and that bacteria got into the blood through breaches in the skin," Newberry said. "That is true in some cases, but improving sterilization techniques hasn't eliminated these infections."

Newberry and his former postdoctoral fellow, Kathryn A. Knoop, PhD, now an assistant professor of immunology at Mayo Clinic, were curious about whether gut bacteria play a role in sepsis that develops in newborns, particularly when such microbes migrate into the bloodstream.

The culprits allowing the bacteria to move into the blood are intestinal cells called goblet cells. These cells secrete mucus to help prevent harmful bacteria from getting into the gut, but they also chaperone bacteria out of the gut, across the immature intestinal lining of a preemie. That scenario provides an entryway for sepsis-causing bacteria to gain access to the bloodstream.

"The critical realization here is that bacteria from the gut can invade the bloodstream," said co-investigator Phillip I. Tarr, MD, the Melvin E. Carnahan Professor of Pediatrics and director of the Pediatric Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition. "Understanding how bacteria moves from the gut into the blood gives us an opportunity to do something about these infections. And the study suggests that breast milk, preferably a mother's own breast milk from her earliest days of breastfeeding, appears to be a very effective way to fend off these infections."

In this study, the researchers gave newborn mice a solution containing Escherichia coli bacteria isolated from the bloodstream of a late-onset sepsis patient shortly after birth. The mouse pups then were nursed either by their own mother or another mother who had given birth to pups at an earlier time, resulting in her breast milk containing lower amounts of epidermal growth factor.

The mice that developed blood infections were those nursed by females that had been lactating for longer periods of time and, therefore, had lower levels of epidermal growth factor in their milk.

"One of the big implications is not only the necessity of using breast milk to feed preemies whenever possible," said Knoop, the paper's first author, "but milk with higher concentrations of epidermal growth factor."

Newberry said it may be possible to add epidermal growth factor to donor breast milk or formula that has lower amounts of the important substance.

"Frequently, donor milk is donated by women near the end of their lactation," he said. "But that milk may not be maximally beneficial to premature babies. We think it may be possible to increase the concentration of epidermal growth factor in the milk that lacks adequate amounts so that we can give that fortified milk to premature infants."

Unlike antibiotics that tend to kill bacteria indiscriminately, breast milk containing higher amounts of epidermal growth factor would not kill harmful or beneficial bacteria in the gut, but might keep such bacteria out of the bloodstream.

"This probably is not a strategy that we would use to treat an infection," Tarr said. "But it may well be useful in the near future to prevent potentially deadly infections."

Children who are diagnosed with type 1 diabetes under the age of seven have a different form (or "endotype") of the condition compared with those diagnosed aged 13 or above, new research has shown.

Type 1 diabetes occurs when the body's immune system attacks the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, destroying them. This means they no longer regulate blood sugar levels effectively and people affected by the condition must inject insulin several times a day to do this job.

The new study, conducted at the University of Exeter, is published today in Diabetologia - the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes [EASD]. The research, funded by Diabetes UK and JDRF, shows for the first time that children who were diagnosed under 7 years old do not process insulin properly and the cells that make it are quickly destroyed. Surprisingly, those who are older at diagnosis (aged 13 or over) often continue to produce normal insulin; findings which reignite important questions about whether these "dormant" insulin-producing cells could be reinvigorated to work more effectively.

In their paper, the Exeter team has suggested new names for the two distinct endotypes: Type 1 Diabetes Endotype 1 (T1DE1) for that diagnosed in the youngest children, and Type 1 Diabetes Endotype 2 (T1DE2) for those who are older at diagnosis.

Professor Noel Morgan, of the University of Exeter Medical School, said "We're extremely excited to find evidence that type 1 diabetes is two separate conditions: T1DE1 and T1DE 2. The significance of this could be enormous in helping us to understand what causes the illness, and in unlocking avenues to prevent future generations of children from getting type 1 diabetes. It might also lead to new treatments, if we can find ways to reactivate dormant insulin-producing cells in the older age group. This would be a significant step towards the holy grail to find a cure for some people."

The paper proposes that children diagnosed between the ages of seven and 12 could fall into either the T1DE 1 or T1DE2 group. The research team is now working on more precise ways to define which type of diabetes such children have by studying the small amounts of insulin released into their blood.

The Exeter team reached their conclusions by analysing two bioresources including the unique Exeter pancreatic biobank comprising more than 130 samples, many of which come from children and young people who died soon after being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. This is the most extensive resource of its type anywhere in the world. They also studied whether the differences seen in the pancreas are mirrored in the blood of people diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at increasing ages.

Sarah Richardson, Associate Professor at the University of Exeter Medical School, said: "Our research could have a significant impact on current emerging therapies for type 1 diabetes. We're seeing a lot of promise in immunotherapies which can slow disease progression, but so far that hasn't translated into effective new treatments. It could be that we need to focus on the use of different therapies in each age group, for these to be effective."

Dr Elizabeth Robertson, Director of Research at Diabetes UK, said: "The era of being able to halt the immune attack behind type 1 diabetes is in reach, but to make new treatments as effective as possible we need to really get to grips with the complexity of the condition. Today's news brings us one step closer to achieving that.

"Being able to make the distinction between different subtypes of type 1 diabetes is an exciting new development and we're proud to have supported this landmark research.

"We now need to make sure this discovery is used to help design trials and tailor future treatments, so we can move closer to stopping and preventing type 1 diabetes."

Karen Addington is UK Chief Executive of the type 1 diabetes charity JDRF, which provided funding for the study. She said: "In order to prevent, treat and cure type 1 diabetes, we need to understand how this complex and challenging condition differs in childhood, adolescence and adulthood. These exciting study results provide a new perspective on type 1 diabetes across different age groups. We congratulate the research team on their progress. JDRF looks forward to further research in this area, exploring and applying these findings."

The study is entitled 'Studies of insulin and proinsulin in pancreas and serum support the existence of aetiopathological endotypes of type 1 diabetes associated with age at diagnosis'. Authors are by P Leete, RA Oram, TJ McDonald, BM Shields, C Ziller, AT Hattersley, SJ Richardson and NG Morgan.

Case study:

Suspected stomach bug was life-threatening diabetes complication

Claire Potts thought her daughter Olivia had a stomach bug when she picked her up from school. She had no idea that her daughter would soon be hospitalised, and fighting for her life.

Olivia was 9 when her health suddenly deteriorated in November 2017. When her toes turned purple and her vomit was "sewer green", her mum called 111.

The family, from Exeter, were soon at the Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital, where a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes was swiftly made. Olivia was in a state of diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), a potentially deadly complication caused by a lack of insulin, a hormone that helps regulate blood sugar.

"It was an absolute shock," said Mrs Potts, 36, a business support administrator. "One minute we were dealing with a stomach bug, the next our daughter was rushed into the high dependency unit. The hospital staff were absolutely fantastic, but it was a lot to take in. We had to adapt to a life of living with type 1 diabetes."

As she recovered, Olivia adapted well. "She used to be scared of needles, but once the staff explained that she had to inject herself with insulin, she just took up the insulin pen and did it," explained Claire, who has two other children.

Once back home, life became a regimented programme of checking blood sugar, injecting insulin and calculating carbs. "I felt like I was coming home with a newborn," said Claire. "I almost felt like I couldn't leave the house. It was overwhelming."

Two years later and Olivia lives an active, fulfilling life marked by Guides, piano and dance lessons. However, she rarely stays with friends because of the need to check her blood sugar levels at midnight, 3am and 6am.

Mrs Potts said "We regularly monitor her blood sugars because of the risk of life-threatening hypo attacks, caused by low blood sugar. Olivia's blood sugars are still very unpredictable and her hypo awareness is minimal. We're also constantly correcting high blood sugars in an attempt to minimise the longer-term devastating impact Diabetes could have on her future health. We're doing all we can to support her to live a full life whilst also teaching her the skills to self-manage her Diabetes into adulthood."

Mrs Potts, who is married to chef Anthony, welcomed the Exeter research. "It's an exciting development. It doesn't tell us what category Olivia was in, because she's in the age group between seven and 12, but anything that helps recruit the right people to clinical trials is a really important step forward."

Researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) have developed a process that allows for the production and degradation of almost any object within a circular economy using additive manufacturing and urban waste, the largest by-product of civilization.

Inspired by the cyclical mode of production and degradation of biological materials by organisms using limited energy and material resources found within localized conditions, the researchers, together with its collaborators, focused on translating those principles in urban ecosystems. This was to reduce its reliance in intercontinental transport, energy demanding manufacturing processes, use of harmful chemicals substances, and dependence on man-made synthetic materials which require complex reclamation procedures past their end-of-life.

SUTD researchers from the same team previously developed a fungus-like adhesive material, also known as FLAM, by effectively transforming chitin and cellulose, into materials for sustainable manufacturing. Derived from the shells of crustaceans and insects, as well as wood and paper, respectively, chitin and cellulose are the two most abundant organic polymers on earth. Touted as a 'green' alternative to plastic, FLAM is not only biodegradable, flexible, and durable; it can be mass-produced on a large scale using 3D printing technology.

Cellulose can be easily obtainable from urban waste such as tissue paper, textiles, and plant matter. However, despite the ubiquitous nature of chitin, this polymer is mostly harvested as an industrial and agricultural product. For instance, chitin is mostly available as a seasonal by-product of the fishing industry and is limited to rural coastal areas. This means that chitin would be needed to be transported over different ecosystems when there is a demand, contributing to freight transportation, which is known to be a key contributor to carbon dioxide emissions.

In the study published by Nature's Scientific Reports, the researchers have developed a link between bio inspired manufacturing and urban waste bio conversion, enabling a different mode of production based on materials that are conveniently available within any regional ecosystem, significantly reducing the need for transportation.

It was determined that chitin can be produced within limited energy requirements and reduce food waste at the same time, easing the largest expense for municipalities all around the world - all with the help of the humble black soldier fly (BSF, Hermetia illucens). The study reports successful extraction of chitin from the shells of these BSFs.

At the same time, the BSF is also globally known for its efficient breakdown of a wide variety of organic materials, such as food waste into proteins, oils and other biomass, thus reducing the amount of waste sent to the landfills.

Despite BSF's popularity, the research team ensured that their developed system was not reliant on the use of BSF or any other unique source of materials since chitin and cellulose are present in a myriad of organisms in every ecosystem on earth such as other insects, fungi, and worms. While these organisms are also used to process waste, they in turn produce chitin as a by-product.

With annual food losses disposed in landfills estimated to be around one-third of the world's total production, bio conversion via insects, fungi and worms, is not only gaining popularity as an effective solution to urban waste management, but it also suggests for an emergent paradigm of a circular urban ecology, spanning from material production and manufacturing to end-of-life reclamation.

Manufacturing with the world's most abundant biological polymers within, or in close proximity to the source of production and consumption - such as cellulose and chitin used for 3D printed FLAM - may not only allow us to address key deviations arising from our urban way of life, but motivate a fundamentally more sustainable economy and society.

"This new development will transform the way we manufacture, enabling an alternative model where materials are produced and consumed using locally available resources. Also, it will allow anyone around the world to adapt and integrate general manufacturing to its surrounding ecosystem," said Assistant Professor Javier G. Fernandez from SUTD, lead author of the paper.

"Close proximity and deep integration of production and consumption cycles inspired by biology within urban ecosystems may not only influence the way we inhabit the cities of tomorrow, but also upstream envision, design and build them," added Associate Professor Stylianos Dritsas also from SUTD and co-author of the paper.

Metal-Air Batteries (MABs), which use oxygen from ambient air as recourses to store and convert energy, have received considerable attention for their potential use in electric vehicles (EVs) owing to their large storage capacity, lightweight, and affordability. A research team, affiliated with UNIST has announced that a new catalyst that could boost MAB performance, such as discharge and charge efficiency, was developed recently.

A research team, led by Professor Guntae Kim in the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST, has unveiled a new composite catalyst that could efficiently enhance the charg-discharge performances when applied to MABs. It is a form of very thin layer of metal oxide films deposited on a surface of perovskite catalysts, and thus the interface naturally formed between the two catalysts enhances the overall performance and stability of the new catalyst.

Metal-air batteries (MABs), in which oxygen from the atmosphere reacts with metals to generate electricity, are one of the lightest and most compact types of batteries. They are equipped with anodes made up of pure metals (i.e. Lithium, Zinc, Magnesium, and Aluminum) and an air cathode that is connected to an inexhaustible source of air. Due to their high theoretical energy density, MABs have been considered a strong cadidate for the next-generation electric vehicles. The currently existing MABs use rare and expensive metal catalysts for their air electrodes, such as platinum (Pt). This has hindered its further commercialization into the marketplace. As an alternative, perovskite catalysts that exhibit excellent catalyic performance has been proposed, yet there exists low activation barriers.

Professor Kim has solved this issue with a new composite catalyst combining two types of catalysts, each of which showed excellent performance in charge and discharge reactions. The metal catalyst (cobalt oxide), which performs well in charging, is deposited on a very thin layer on top of the manganese-based perovskite catalyst (LSM), which performs well in discharge. As a result, the synergistic effect of the two catalysts became optimal when the deposition process was repeated 20 times.

"During the repeated deposition and oxidation cycles of atomic layer deposition (ALD) process, the Mn cations diffuse into Co3O4 from LSM, and therefore, the LSM-20-Co catalyst is composed of LSM encapsulated with the self-reconstructedspinel interlayer (Co3O4/MnCo32O4/LSM)," says Arim Seong (Combined M.S/Ph.D. of Energy and Chemical Engineering, UNIST), the first author of the study. "And this has enhanced the catalytic activitiy of the hybrid catalyst, LSM-20-Co, leading to superior bifunctional electrochemical performances for the ORR and the OER in alkaline solutions."

"To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the self-reconstructed interlayer induced by the in-situ cation diffusion during ALD process for designing an efficient and stable bifunctional catalyst for alkaline zinc-air batteries," according to the research team.

"Our findings provide the rational design strategy of self-reconstructed interlayer for efficient electro-catalyst," says Professor Kim. "Therefore, this work can provide insight into the rational design strategy of metal oxide with perovskite materials."

When it comes to batteries, there are always areas for improvement: the race is on to develop batteries that are cheaper, safer, longer lasting, more energy dense, and easily recyclable. 

In a review article published in the March 2020 issue of Nature Nanotechnology, nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego offer a research roadmap that includes four challenges that need to be addressed in order to advance a promising class of batteries—all-solid-state batteries—to commercialization. This article summarizes the team’s work to tackle these challenges over the past three years, which have been reported in several peer-reviewed articles published in various journals.

Unlike today’s rechargeable lithium ion batteries, which contain liquid electrolytes that are often flammable, batteries with solid electrolytes offer the possibility of greater safety, in addition to a whole range of benefits including higher energy density.  

In the Nature Nanotechnology review article, the researchers focus on inorganic solid electrolytes such as ceramic oxides or sulfide glasses. Inorganic solid electrolytes are a relatively new class of solid electrolytes for all-solid-state batteries (in contrast to organic solid electrolytes which are more extensively researched.)

Roadmap: inorganic electrolytes for all-solid-state batteries

The following is an outline of the roadmap that the researchers describe in their review article:

1) Creating stable solid electrolyte chemical interfaces 

2) New tools for in operando diagnosis and characterization 

3) Scalable and cost-effective manufacturability

4) Batteries designed for recyclability

“It’s critical that we step back and think about how to address these challenges simultaneously because they are all interrelated,” said Shirley Meng, a nanoengineering professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “If we are going to make good on the promise of all-solid-state batteries, we must find solutions that address all these challenges at the same time.” 

As director of the UC San Diego Sustainable Power and Energy Center and director of the UC San Diego Institute for Materials Discovery and Design, Meng is a key member of a cluster of researchers at the forefront of all solid-state battery research and development at UC San Diego. 

Creating stable solid electrolyte chemical interfaces 

Solid-state electrolytes have come a long way since their early days, when the first electrolytes discovered had exhibited conductivity values too low for practical applications. Today’s advanced solid-state electrolytes show conductivities exceeding even those of conventional liquid electrolytes used in today’s batteries (greater than 10 mS cm-1). Ionic conductivity refers to how fast lithium ions can move within the electrolyte.

Unfortunately, most highly conductive solid electrolytes reported are often electrochemically unstable and face problems when applied against electrode materials used in batteries.

“At this point, we should shift our focus away from chasing higher ionic conductivity. Instead, we should focus on stability between solid state electrolytes and electrodes,” said Meng. 

If ionic conductivity is analogous to how fast a car can be driven, then interface stability refers to how hard it is to get through rush hour traffic. It doesn’t matter how fast your car can go if you’re stuck in traffic on your way to work.

Researchers at UC San Diego recently addressed this interface stability bottleneck, demonstrating how to stabilize the electrode-electrolyte interface and improve battery performance using solid electrolytes with moderate ionic conductivities but exhibit stable interfaces.

Related interface stability papers from UC San Diego:

Revealing Nanoscale Solid–Solid Interfacial Phenomena for Long-Life and High-Energy All-Solid-State Batteries in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces

Elucidating Reversible Electrochemical Redox of Li6PS5Cl Solid Electrolyte in ACS Energy Letters

New tools for in operando diagnosis and characterization 

Why do batteries fail? Why does short circuit occur? The process of understanding what goes on inside a battery requires characterization down to the nanoscale, ideally in real time. For all-solid-state batteries, this is immensely challenging. 

Battery characterization typically relies on using probes such as X-rays, or electron or optical microscopy. In commercial lithium ion batteries, the liquid electrolytes used are transparent, allowing observation of various phenomena at the respective electrodes. In some cases, this liquid can also be washed away to provide a cleaner surface for higher resolution characterization.

“We have a much easier time observing today’s lithium ion batteries. But in all-solid-state batteries, everything is solid or buried. If you try the same techniques for all-solid-state batteries, it’s like trying to see through a brick wall,” said Darren H. S. Tan, a nanoengineering Ph.D. candidate at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. 

In addition, solid electrolytes and lithium metal used in solid-state batteries can be sensitive to electron beam damage. This means that standard electron microscopy techniques used to study batteries would damage the materials of interest before they can be observed and characterized. 

One way UC San Diego researchers are overcoming these challenges is using cryogenic methods to keep battery materials cool, mitigating their decomposition under the electron microscope probe. 

Another tool used to overcome the obstacles of characterizing solid electrolyte interfaces is X-ray tomography. This is similar to what humans undergo during their health checkups. The approach was used in a recent paper reporting on the observation—without opening or disrupting the battery itself—of lithium dendrites buried within the solid electrolyte. 

Related characterization papers from UC San Diego:

Cryogenic Focused Ion Beam Characterization of Lithium Metal Anodes in ACS Energy Letters

Stack Pressure Considerations for Room?Temperature All?Solid?State Lithium Metal Batteries in Advanced Energy Materials

Scalable and cost-effective manufacturability

Breakthroughs in battery research often don’t mean much if they are not scalable. This includes advances for all-solid-state batteries. If this class of batteries is to enter the market within the next few years, the battery community needs ways to manufacture and handle their sensitive component materials cost effectively and at large scales.

Over the past few decades, researchers have developed—in the lab—various solid electrolyte materials that exhibit chemical properties that are ideal for batteries. Unfortunately, many of these promising materials are either too costly or too difficult to scale up for high-volume manufacturing. For example, many become highly brittle when made thin enough for roll-to-roll manufacturing, which demands thicknesses of under 30 micrometers. 

Additionally, methods to produce solid electrolytes at larger scales are not well established. For instance, most synthesis protocols require multiple energetic processes that include multiple milling, thermal annealing and solution processing steps. 

To overcome such limitations, researchers at UC San Diego are merging multiple fields of expertise. They are combining ceramics used in traditional material sciences with polymers used in organic chemistry to develop flexible and stable solid electrolytes that are compatible with scalable manufacturing processes. To address problems of material synthesis, the team also reports how solid electrolyte materials can be scalably produced using single-step fabrication without the need for additional annealing steps.

Related scalable manufacturing papers from UC San Diego:

“Enabling Thin and Flexible Solid-State Composite Electrolytes by the Scalable Solution Process” in ACS Applied Energy Materials

“Single-step synthesis of highly conductive Na3PS4 solid electrolyte for sodium all solid-state batteries” in Journal of Power Sources

Batteries designed for recyclability

Spent batteries contain valuable and limited-abundance materials such as lithium and cobalt that can be reused. 

When they reach the end of their life cycles, these batteries need to go somewhere, or else they will simply be accumulated over time as waste. 

Today’s recycling methods, however, are often expensive, energy and time intensive, and include toxic chemicals for processing. Moreover, these methods only recover a small fraction of the battery materials due to low rates of recycling of electrolytes, lithium salts, separator, additives and packaging materials. In large part, this is because today’s batteries have not been designed with cost-effective recyclability in mind from the start. 

UC San Diego researchers are at the forefront of efforts to design reusability and recyclability into tomorrow’s all-solid-state batteries. 

“Cost-effective reusability and recyclability must be baked into the future advances that are needed to develop all-solid-state batteries that provide high energy densities of 500 watt-hours per kg or better,” said UC San Diego nanoengineering professor Zheng Chen. “It’s critical that we don’t make the same recyclability mistakes that were made with lithium ion batteries.”

Batteries also need to be designed with their full life-cycle in mind. This means designing batteries that are meant to remain in use well after they drop below the 60 to 80 percent of their original capacity that often marks the end of the useful life of a battery. This can be done by exploring secondary uses for batteries such as stationary storage or for emergency power, extending their lifespans before they finally hit the recycling centers.

All-solid-state batteries with organic electrolytes offer great promise as a future battery technology that will deliver high energy density, safety, long life times and recyclability. But turning these possibilities into realities will require strategic research efforts that consider how the remaining challenges, including recyclability, are interrelated. 

German researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin found that even a short test can reliably predict students' success within their first year of study in Economics - much better than an intelligence test or predictions based on school grades. Motivated by the high number of dropouts in this study domain, the researchers investigated whether and how study success in Economics can be predicted reliably already at the beginning of a degree course. They found that a brief entrance test can predict students' domain-specific grades after the first year of study. "This means that we could use a short, standardized entrance test to objectively and validly assess the entry preconditions of prospective students that are relevant to their study progress," according to the project leaders of the study, Professor Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia and Professor Hans Anand Pant.

High dropout rates in Economics

In Germany, about 450,000 young people enroll in Economics courses every year. However, almost one in four drop out of their studies, with the rate being even higher at some institutions. This rising dropout rate results from the increasingly large heterogeneity of students' study-related preconditions, which are also influenced by the many different ways of gaining access to the German higher education system, including international mobility, as well as the different requirements in the German federal states, for instance, in terms of school curricula and school-leaving examinations (Abitur).

WiWiSET project shows practical benefits and potential of study entrance tests

Up to now, the sole admission criterion for studying Economics has been the final school grade (Abitur). Generally, no special previous knowledge is required for this study domain. In the project "WiWiSET: Validation of a university entrance test in the domain of economics", funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the researchers in Mainz and Berlin examined whether a standardized entrance test with selected tasks can validly measure the state of previous knowledge in Economics and thus allows for a reliable prognosis of study progress. The Test of Economic Literacy (TEL-IV) used in the study was developed in the United States and adapted by the WiWiSET team to the German university context (TEL-D). Almost 4,000 Economics students at a total of 41 universities and colleges throughout Germany were recruited to participate in the representative survey. Over the course of three years, two rounds of the survey took place, in which the students were interviewed first before the beginning of their studies and then at the end of the second or the beginning of their third semester.

The domain-specific entrance test TEL-D was used to assess whether the first-year students had a fundamental understanding of macroeconomic and microeconomic interrelations, which is usually acquired, for example, in a commercial apprenticeship or in an advanced business course in high school. "This test does not focus on general cognitive skills, but on subject-related thinking and understanding, such as the fundamental concept of supply and demand," explained Professor Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia. Professor Hans Anand Pant elaborated: "Furthermore, a lot of mathematical and statistical-methodological understanding is required for a successful study of Economics. This is often underestimated by first-year students. More than 80 percent of the students do not know what studying Economics actually means."

TEL-D study entrance test is diagnostically more conclusive than intelligence tests or school grades

The researchers were able to show that study success, measured via students' academic grades, can be predicted significantly after the first year of study in all Economics study modules. The TEL-D is therefore capable of reliably predicting students' academic achievement as well as dropouts during the first year of study. Neither an intelligence test used for comparison nor the Abitur grade alone deliver the same accuracy.

Based on these findings, the project leaders Professor Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia and Professor Hans Anand Pant emphasized that students' learning potential and previous knowledge must be taken into account systematically to reduce the current high student failure and dropout rates. "Unfortunately, refresher or bridging courses at the beginning of studies are only rarely effective," concluded Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia. "We have seen that it is the students' prior knowledge and their skills that are decisive in the preparatory phase of studies." These abilities could be assessed cost-effectively and with technical ease using a short domain-specific entrance test. The TEL-D, for example, can be completed in 10 minutes in its short version and in 25 to 30 minutes in its long version and provides a much better prognosis than the conventional university entrance qualification.

PITTSBURGH, March 13, 2020 - Inspired by a tactic cancer cells use to evade the immune system, University of Pittsburgh researchers have engineered tiny particles that can trick the body into accepting transplanted tissue as its own.

Rats that were treated with these cell-sized microparticles developed permanent immune tolerance to grafts -- including a whole limb -- from a donor rat, while keeping the rest of their immune system intact, according to a paper published today in Science Advances.

"It's like hacking into the immune system borrowing a strategy used by one of humanity's worst enemies to trick the body into accepting a transplant," said senior author Steven Little, Ph.D., William Kepler Whiteford Endowed Professor and Chair of chemical and petroleum engineering in the Swanson School of Engineering at Pitt. "And we do it synthetically."

The advantage of a synthetic approach rather than cell-based therapy, which is currently in clinical trials, is that the treatment logistics are much simpler.

"Instead of isolating cells from a patient, growing them up in the lab, injecting them back in and hoping they find the right location, we're packaging it all up in an engineered system that recruits these naturally occurring cells right to the transplanted graft," said lead author James Fisher, M.D., Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in the Pitt School of Medicine.

The microparticles work by releasing a native protein secreted by tumors, CCL22, which draws regulatory T cells (Treg cells) to the site of the graft, where they tag the foreign tissue as "self" so that it evades immune attack.

Microparticle-treated animals maintained healthy grafts for as long as they were monitored -- a little under a year, equivalent to about 30 human years. All it took was two shots to effect seemingly permanent change.

In a companion paper published recently in PNAS, the researchers showed that these engineered microparticles can train the immune system of one strain of rat to accept a donor limb from a different strain. This new paper shows that the effects are specific to the intended donor. Skin grafts from a third strain were rapidly rejected.

Today, transplant patients take daily doses of immunosuppressant drugs to avoid rejection, leaving them vulnerable to cancer, diabetes, infectious diseases and a host of other ailments that come along with a weakened immune system.

"These drugs hammer the immune system into submission so it can't attack the transplanted organ, but then it can't protect the body either," said coauthor Stephen Balmert, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in the Pitt School of Medicine. "We're trying to teach the immune system to tolerate the limb, so that a transplant recipient can remain immunocompetent."

The risks of lifelong immunosuppression are particularly problematic when the transplant isn't a life-saving procedure. Doctors and patients have to consider whether the benefits outweigh the risks.

"The ability to induce transplant tolerance while avoiding systemic immunosuppression, as demonstrated in these innovative studies, is especially important in the context of vascularized composite transplantation where patients receive quality-of-life transplants, such as those of hands or face," said coauthor Angus Thomson, Ph.D., professor of surgery and immunology in the Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute at Pitt.

The South Asian summer monsoon (SASM) provides the principal water supply for over a billion people. In good monsoon years, farmers reap a rich harvest, while in bad monsoon years, severe droughts wipe out crops. And heavy rains during monsoon season cause floods and hit economy badly. Policy-makers and stakeholders urgently need projection of SASM for the coming 15-30 years --usually termed as "near future" in climate research community. Unfortunately, there are large uncertainties in current projection due to climate internal variability.

"Internal variability refers to variations in the mean state due to natural internal processes within the climate system. It is usually regarded as 'noise' in climate projection." Said Xin Huang, the lead author of a new study published in Science Advances on March 13, 2020. Huang is a doctoral student with the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Huang, along with her mentor Prof. Tianjun Zhou and collaborators from USA and Germany, identify the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO) -- a large-scale long period oscillation influencing climate variability over the Pacific Basin -- as one of the key internal variability modes that reduce the uncertainties and improve projections.

The team used a 100-member ensemble of simulations by the Max Planck Institute Earth System Model (MPI-ESM) and a 50-member ensemble of simulations by the Canadian Earth System Model (CanESM2) to quantify the uncertainty caused by internal variability in the near-future projection of SASM rainfall.

"We found that internal variability can eclipse the externally forced SASM rainfall change, leading to very different rainfall trends for next 15-30 years", explained Huang, "So we wanted to further identify the key internal mode responsible for the spread in the projected SASM rainfall".

After analyzing the similarities and differences among the 150-member model projections, the team found a linkage between different realizations of the IPO phase and the spread in the SASM rainfall projection. Different IPO phase transitions can modulate the magnitude or even reverse the sign of the SASM rainfall trends. Thus, the IPO is identified as one of the leading internal modes influencing the near-term projection of SASM rainfall.

"Historical data have already shown the signal of IPO in SASM change, but the climate projection community usually regarded the signal as noise in the projection. We show evidences that accounting for future IPO phase evolution helps effectively reduce the projection uncertainty of near-term SASM rainfall; in particular, it improves the projection of an extreme wetting or drying trend for the next 15-30 years", said Huang.

The findings highlight the urgent need to predict IPO evolution for the next few decades.

"A large part of climate change adaptation and mitigation activities is based on prognoses delivered by climate models, so a highly robust and reliable climate prediction is the base of policy decision making. This research provides a practical way of more reliably projecting near-term South Asian summer monsoon changes", the corresponding author Prof. Tianjun Zhou explained the importance of the study.

Zhou is a member of CLIVAR (Climate and Ocean: Variability, Predictability and Change) / GEWEX (Global Water and Energy Exchanges) Monsoons Panel of World Climate Research Program (WCRP), and co-chair of Global Monsoons Model Intercomparison Project (GMMIP), which is a coordinated multi-model investigation into decadal variability of monsoons.

According to Zhou, the study is part of GMMIP efforts devoting to improving the predictive skill for monsoons for the upcoming decades, which in turn will help policy-makers and stakeholders develop better climate strategies.

Pathogens such as viruses and bacteria have been at war with their hosts for millions of years. The arms race between the immune system of the hosts and infectious pathogens is considered to be a critical driver of evolution. All vertebrates, including humans, developed a very sophisticated self-protection device, which is called the adaptive immune system. Specialized immune cells called T cells and B cells detect and destroy invading pathogens. One of its key features and its secret weapon is immunological memory. The cells remember infections leading to an even more efficient reaction to the same pathogen when re-exposed.

Searching for the design principles of adaptive immunity

In recent years, researchers have found that adaptive immunity has evolved at least twice independently in the early phases of vertebrate evolution. Vertebrates are commonly divided into two groups. Animals of the most numerous group all possess a jaw, and hence are called "jawed" vertebrates; they encompass such diverse creatures as sharks and humans. By contrast, a small group of vertebrates lacks jaws, and hence these animals are called "jawless" vertebrates; lampreys and hagfish belong to this group.

"The basic design of the adaptive immune systems in these two groups of vertebrates are surprisingly similar, considering that these groups evolved independently for more than 500 million years," explains Thomas Boehm, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics. The scientists know that all vertebrates share the two lineages of T and B cells that are equipped with receptors capable of recognizing foreign structures, often referred to as antigens. Because the immune system has to distinguish between very different types of antigens, the structures of the receptors also vary; they are made up of similar but not identical building blocks that are produced in a random fashion during the development of T and B cells.

Dissecting adaptive immunity with CRISPR/Cas9

One of the big surprises of recent research was that the building blocks of antigen receptors of jawless and jawed vertebrates are structurally different, yet serve the same purpose during immune defence. "Lampreys use short peptides, called leucine-rich repeats and arrange them like strings on a bead to form the so-called variable lymphocyte receptors. However, up to now, it was unclear how these strings are stitched together," explains Ryo Morimoto first-author of the study. This important question has now been answered by the Max Planck researchers in Freiburg, working together with scientists at the French INRA in Rennes.

To do this, the scientists succeeded for the first time in using the famous gene scissor CRISPR/Cas9 to study gene function in the immune system of lampreys. By using CRISPR/Cas9, they specifically destroyed a gene in lampreys that they long suspected to be required for the assembly of a particular class of variable lymphocyte receptor genes, which contain the blueprint of lamprey antibodies. Indeed, when the so-called cytidine deaminase gene 2 (CDA2) was crippled, the lamprey could no longer produce antibodies.

Shared tool-kit to create antibodies

The CDA2 gene is of great interest to immunologists, because it is related to a gene, called AID, of jawed vertebrates that helps to refine the specificity of their antibodies. "It seems, that nature has chosen molecules from a shared tool-kit to support the formation of useful antibodies in both types of vertebrates. These results are an important advance in our understanding of the evolution and function of the immune system of vertebrates," says Thomas Boehm. Now that the scientists have successfully used gene scissors to investigate immune gene function in lampreys, they plan to test the role of many other genes that are suspected of supporting immune functions in these ancient vertebrates.

By collecting more information using this genetic approach, they hope to eventually reconstruct the key components of the immune system of the first-ever vertebrate. Doing this will allow them to learn which of the many functions that are now carried out by the immune system of living vertebrates are absolutely essential and which can be dispensed with. Ultimately, the Max Planck researchers hope to use this information to better understand the consequences of failing immune protection in human patients suffering from autoimmune diseases and cancers.

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have developed a new method to analyse particulate matter more precisely than ever before. With its help, they disproved an established doctrine: that molecules in aerosols undergo no further chemical transformations because they are enclosed in other suspended particulate matter. In the smog chamber at PSI, they analysed chemical compounds directly in aerosols and observed how molecules dissociated and thus released, for example, gaseous formic acid into the atmosphere. These findings will help to improve the understanding of global processes involved in cloud formation and air pollution and to refine the corresponding models. The results of this investigation are published today in the journal Science Advances.

Anyone who takes a walk through a coniferous forest and enjoys the tangy, refreshing air is inhaling α-pinene. This is one of the volatile organic compounds in the oils of conifer trees, and it also occurs in eucalyptus and rosemary. The smell triggers pleasant feelings in most people. Less pleasant is that the compound changes in the atmosphere, under the influence of radicals, into other compounds, so-called highly oxidised organic molecules. Some of these are reactive, to some extent harmful substances. They have only recently come under scrutiny by atmospheric researchers, and their role, for example in cloud formation, is not yet understood.

These highly oxidized organic molecules are less volatile than the starting substance α-pinene and therefore condense easily. Together with dust particles and other solid and liquid substances in the air, they form what we call particulate matter or aerosols.

"Up to now it was thought that such molecules are protected from further transformations once they have landed in particulate matter," says Andre Prévôt of the Laboratory of Atmospheric Chemistry at PSI. "It was believed that they then would not change any more, but would simply spread out over the atmosphere and eventually rain down."

This widespread opinion does not correspond to reality, however, as Prévôt and his fellow researchers at PSI showed: "The reactions continue, even in the particulate matter." The molecules remain reactive and either react with each other to form larger particles or disassociate, thereby releasing for example formic acid. This common compound is found not only in ants and stinging nettles, but also in the atmosphere, where it is an important indicator of air pollution.

The PSI researchers' observations should help to improve simulation models, such as those for cloud formation and air pollution. The models simulate what happens in the atmosphere to predict, for example, how a reduction in certain emissions will affect air quality.

From the aerosol into the measuring device

For the first time, PSI researchers analysed chemical compounds directly in particulate matter under atmospheric conditions. For this they used the PSI smog chamber, in which processes in the atmosphere can be simulated. The researchers injected a droplet of α-pinene into the chamber and caused the compound to react with ozone. Over a period of 15 hours, they observed which chemical compounds formed from α-pinene and which disappeared again afterwards.

This was made possible by a new analytic device for atmospheric measurements that the researchers developed in cooperation with the company Tofwerk in Thun, Switzerland: a so-called EESI-TOF (extractive electrospray ionisation time-of-flight mass spectrometer). "It also detects larger molecules directly in the aerosol," explains atmospheric chemist Urs Baltensperger. "Previous measurement methods, on the other hand, chop up the molecules into smaller fragments at high temperatures." The new device ionises without fragmentation. "We can record each molecule separately."

Tofwerk has now brought the device to market with the help of PSI, so that other atmospheric researchers can also benefit from the new method.

Measurements in Zurich

The new analytic method can be used not only in the laboratory, but also directly on site.

During the winter of 2018/19 and the summer of 2019, PSI researchers used it to investigate aerosols in the air in Zurich.

As it turned out, a good third of Zurich's particulate matter in summer consists solely of reaction products of α-pinene and similar molecules. In winter, however, emissions from wood-burning systems and their reaction products come to the fore.

The researchers have planned further measurement campaigns in China and India. There they want to analyse which molecules form in the air of a city with more than a million inhabitants.

A novel technology, capable of analyzing nanomaterials in our daily lives with the use of common 'salt' has been developed. This allows various molecules to amplify up to hundreds of times the signals they produce in response to light, thereby making them very useful for nanomaterial research.

A research team, led by Professor Chang Young Lee in the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST has introduced a novel technology, which allows carbon nanotubes (CNTs) to be easily observed under room temperature. The coating of CNT surface with salt crystals allows direct observation of the shape and position changes of CNTs. Their findings also revealed that salt crystals made on CNTs could serve as a lens through which to observe nanomaterials.

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs), which are tube-like materials made of carbon atoms linked in hexagonal shapes, have recently attracted much attention due to their unique optical, mechanical, and electrical properties. However, individual carbon nanotubes are difficult to observe with a general optical microscope because of their extremely small size. Although these objects on a very fine scale can be to examined via the electron microscope that uses a beam of electrons or the atomic force microscopy (AFM) that uses force between individual atoms, such methods are difficult to use and limit the observable area.

The team overcame these limitations by using salts commonly found in the environment. When salt water is added to carbon nanotubes arranged in one dimension and an electric field is applied, salt ions move along the carbon nanotube outer surface to form salt crystals. These salt crystals, 'clothes', allow the observation of carbon nanotubes distributed over a large area using only the optical microscope commonly used in laboratories. Salt crystals dissolve well in water, which does not damage carbon nanotubes, and are stable before being washed out, so they can be semi-permanently visualized.

The team also found that salt crystals formed on carbon nanotubes can amplify the optical signals of carbon nanotubes by hundreds of times. Normally, when light receives, internal molecules interact with light energy to emit new signals, or optical signals. Amplifying and analyzing this signal reveals the properties of the material, with salt crystals acting as a "lens" to amplify the optical signal. In fact, the team used the "salt lens" to easily find out the electrical properties and diameters of carbon nanotubes.

"The degree of optical signal amplification can be controlled by changing the refractive index according to the type of salt and the shape and size of the salt crystals," says Yun-Tae Kim in the School of Energy and Checmial Engineering at UNIST, the first author of the study.

The team went a step further by using a "salt lens" to move traces of glucose and urea molecules through the outer surface of the carbon nanotubes and detect them. The salt lens formed on the outer surface of the carbon nanotubes amplifies the optical signal to find a molecule containing one mole (M) of hundred diameters.

"The key to this technology is the ability to measure physical properties in real time without damaging nanomaterials at normal temperatures and pressures," says Professor Lee. "Our findings could be more widely applied to research of nanomaterials and nanophenomena."