‘Dancing molecules’ successfully repair severe spinal cord injuries

A new injectable therapy forms nanofibers with two different bioactive signals (green and orange) that communicate with cells to initiate repair of the injured spinal cord.
Illustration by Mark Seniw

Northwestern University researchers have developed a new injectable therapy that harnesses “dancing molecules” to reverse paralysis and repair tissue after severe spinal cord injuries.

In a new study, researchers administered a single injection to tissues surrounding the spinal cords of paralyzed mice. Just four weeks later, the animals regained the ability to walk.

The research will be published in the Nov. 12 issue of the journal Science. The study is now available online.

By sending bioactive signals to trigger cells to repair and regenerate, the breakthrough therapy dramatically improved severely injured spinal cords in five key ways: (1) The severed extensions of neurons, called axons, regenerated; (2) scar tissue, which can create a physical barrier to regeneration and repair, significantly diminished; (3) myelin, the insulating layer of axons that is important in transmitting electrical signals efficiently, reformed around cells; (4) functional blood vessels formed to deliver nutrients to cells at the injury site; and (5) more motor neurons survived.

‘Wonder gas’ hailed as new treatment for diabetic foot ulcers could also kill COVID-19 virus indoors

Dr Endre Szili in his lab at UniSA's Future Industries Institute.

A new formulation developed by University of South Australia scientists to treat antimicrobial-resistant bacterial infections in diabetic foot ulcers could also be used to kill the COVID-19 virus circulating in air conditioning systems.

Enhancing cold plasma ionized gas with peracetic acid eradicates bacteria in wounds and substantially reduces SARS-CoV-2 viral loads, Australian and UK scientists claim in a paper published in Applied Physics Letters.

In an experiment to find an effective treatment for diabetic foot ulcers which are notoriously resistant to antibiotics, UniSA physicist Dr Endre Szili, in collaboration with Professor Rob Short at Lancaster University and British colleagues at the University of Bath, GAMA Healthcare and AGA Nanotech, made an unexpected discovery.

“By combining cold plasma gas with acetyl donor molecules to improve its oxidation action, we found it completely killed bacteria that are found in chronic wounds,” according to lead researcher Dr Szili.

“We then investigated whether this same technology could be effective at killing the SARS-CoV-2 virus and it appears that it is.

“We showed that we could achieve an 84 per cent reduction in viral load using plasma combined with acetyl donor molecules based on a standard dosage that is safe for human cells. However, it is highly possible with some modifications that we could eradicate it completely.”

Global Temperatures Over Last 24,000 Years Show Today's Warming 'Unprecedented'

Global average surface temperature since the last ice age 24,000 years ago. Time is stretched for the past 1000 years to visualize recent changes.
Credit: Matthew Osman

A University of Arizona-led effort to reconstruct Earth's climate since the last ice age, about 24,000 years ago, highlights the main drivers of climate change and how far out of bounds human activity has pushed the climate system.

The study, published Wednesday in Nature, has three main findings:

It verifies that the main drivers of climate change since the last ice age are rising greenhouse gas concentrations and the retreat of the ice sheets.

It suggests a general warming trend over the last 10,000 years, settling a decade-long debate the paleoclimatology community about whether this period trended warmer or cooler.

The magnitude and rate warming over the last 150 years far surpasses the magnitude and rate of changes over the last 24,000 years.

"This reconstruction suggests that current temperatures are unprecedented in 24,000 years, and also suggests that the speed of human-caused global warming is faster than anything we've seen in that same time," said Jessica Tierney, a UArizona geosciences associate professor and co-author of the study.

New method to detect Tatooine-like planets validated

A new technique developed in part by University of Hawaiʻi astronomer Nader Haghighipour has allowed scientists to quickly detect a transiting planet with two suns.

Termed circumbinary planets, these objects orbit around a pair of stars. For years, these planets were merely the subject of science fiction, like Tatooine in Star Wars. However, thanks to NASA’s successful planet-hunting Kepler and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) missions, a team of astronomers, including Haghighipour, have found 14 such bodies so far.

Kepler and TESS detect planets via the transit method, where astronomers measure the tiny dimming of a star as a planet passes in front of its host star, blocking some of the starlight. Usually, astronomers need to see at least three of these transits to pin down the planet’s orbit. This becomes challenging when there are two host stars.

“Detecting circumbinary planets is much more complicated than finding planets orbiting single stars. When a planet orbits a double-star system, transits of the same star don’t occur at consistent intervals,” explained Haghighipour. “The planet might transit one star, and then transit the other, before transiting the first star again, and so on.”

Domestic cats drive spread of Toxoplasma parasite to wildlife

Shelby Credit: Heidi-Ann Fourkiller

New UBC research suggests free-roaming cats are likely to blame in the spread of the potentially deadly Toxoplasma gondii parasite to wildlife in densely populated urban areas.

The study—the first to analyze so many wildlife species over a global scale—also highlights how healthy ecosystems can protect against these types of pathogens.

The researchers, led by UBC faculty of forestry adjunct professor Dr. Amy Wilson, examined 45,079 cases of toxoplasmosis in wild mammals—a disease that has been linked to nervous system disorders, cancers and other debilitating chronic conditions—using data from 202 global studies.

They found wildlife living near dense urban areas were more likely to be infected.

“As increasing human densities are associated with increased densities of domestic cats, our study suggests that free-roaming domestic cats—whether pets or feral cats—are the most likely cause of these infections,” says Dr. Wilson.

“This finding is significant because by simply limiting free roaming of cats, we can reduce the impact of Toxoplasma on wildlife.”

One infected cat can excrete as many as 500 million Toxoplasma oocysts (or eggs) in just two weeks. The oocysts can then live for years in soil and water with the potential to infect any bird or mammal, including humans. Toxoplasmosis is particularly dangerous for pregnant people.

New Bird Identified by SDSU Biologists and Collaborators

The Inti tanager (Photo: Ryan Terrill)

The vivid yellow Inti tanager was discovered in Bolivia and Peru.

“If we want to sustain ecosystems, we have to know all the players.”

After persuading his parents to bring home a bird feeder from his relatives’ hardware store, Kevin Burns became captivated by watching his avian visitors. He would flip through pages in a bulky encyclopedia to know which kind of bird was flitting about.

Now an ornithologist and professor of biology at San Diego State University, Burns’s childhood fascination led him and his collaborators to identify a new bird, Heliothraupis oneilli, not previously described in any field guide.

The bird’s common name, the Inti tanager, is named after the word for sun in Quechua, the Indigenous language of the tropical mountainous area it inhabits, befitting of its vivid yellow feathers and tendency to sing during midday.

Burns’s colleagues from Louisiana State University first spotted the bird while leading a birdwatching tour over twenty years ago, in the foothills of the Andes mountains in Peru. But they were not able to collect enough genetic material to analyze until 2011 when they found additional Inti tanagers breeding in nearby Bolivia during the rainy season.

Black hole found hiding in star cluster outside our galaxy

This artist’s impression shows a compact black hole 11 times as massive as the Sun and the five-solar-mass star orbiting it. The two objects are located in NGC 1850, a cluster of thousands of stars roughly 160 000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a Milky Way neighbour. The distortion of the star’s shape is due to the strong gravitational force exerted by the black hole.   Not only does the black hole’s gravitational force distort the shape of the star, but it also influences its orbit. By looking at these subtle orbital effects, a team of astronomers were able to infer the presence of the black hole, making it the first small black hole outside of our galaxy to be found this way. For this discovery, the team used the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.  Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser
Hi-Res Zoomable Image

Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), astronomers have discovered a small black hole outside the Milky Way by looking at how it influences the motion of a star in its close vicinity. This is the first time this detection method has been used to reveal the presence of a black hole outside of our galaxy. The method could be key to unveiling hidden black holes in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, and to help shed light on how these mysterious objects form and evolve.

This image shows NGC1850, a cluster of thousands of stars roughly
160 000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Credit: ESO, NASA/ESA/M. Romaniello
Hi-Res Zoomable image and Full Caption

The newly found black hole was spotted lurking in NGC 1850, a cluster of thousands of stars roughly 160 000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbor galaxy of the Milky Way.

“Similar to Sherlock Holmes tracking down a criminal gang from their missteps, we are looking at every single star in this cluster with a magnifying glass in one hand trying to find some evidence for the presence of black holes but without seeing them directly,” says Sara Saracino from the Astrophysics Research Institute of Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, who led the research now accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. “The result shown here represents just one of the wanted criminals, but when you have found one, you are well on your way to discovering many others, in different clusters.”

This first “criminal” tracked down by the team turned out to be roughly 11 times as massive as our Sun. The smoking gun that put the astronomers on the trail of this black hole was its gravitational influence on the five-solar-mass star orbiting it.

Development of a curious robot to study coral reef ecosystems

A grant by the National Science Foundation to researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and Syracuse University aims to open new avenues of robotic study of coral reefs by developing autonomous underwater vehicles capable of navigating complex environments and of collecting data over long periods of time. The team led by WHOI computer scientist Yogesh Girdhar aims to build a robot capable of navigating a reef ecosystem and measuring the biomass, biodiversity, and behavior of organisms living in or passing through a reef over extended periods of time.

Coral reefs support the health of the ocean and support large numbers of people worldwide. About one in four marine organisms relies on reefs at some point in their lifecycle, and hundreds of millions of people derive food, jobs, and protection from storms and erosion from reef ecosystems. A 2020 report on the status of coral reefs worldwide put the value of benefits reefs provide at $2.7 trillion per year. Despite this, reefs are in decline around the world as a result of rising temperatures, ocean acidification, pollution, and other threats. And scientists are scrambling to better understand complex reef ecosystems and devise ways to deal with a growing crisis.

“The tools we have right now to study coral reefs are pretty primitive,” said Girdhar. “The robots and the sensors we have at the moment can’t capture the spatial and temporal diversity of a reef at the same time. We want to amplify the capability of scientists in the field and the tools they’re using.”

Baby teeth may one day help identify kids at risk for mental disorders later in life

Like the rings of a tree, teeth contain growth lines that may reveal clues about childhood experiences. The thickness of growth marks in primary (or “baby”) teeth may help identify children at risk for depression and other mental health disorders later in life, according to a ground-breaking investigation led by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) using data from a world-renowned health study in Bristol and published in JAMA Network Open.

The team analyzed 70 primary teeth collected from 70 children enrolled in the Children of the 90s study (also known as the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children) based at the University of Bristol. Parents donated primary teeth (specifically, the pointed teeth on each side of the front of the mouth known as canines) that naturally fell out of the mouths of children aged 5 to 7.

The results of this study could one day lead to the development of a much-needed tool for identifying children who have been exposed to early-life adversity, which is a risk factor for psychological problems, allowing them to be monitored and guided towards preventive treatments, if necessary.

The origin of this study traces back several years, when senior author Erin C. Dunn, ScD, MPH, learned about work in the field of anthropology that could help solve a longstanding problem in her own research. Dunn is a social and psychiatric epidemiologist and an investigator in MGH’s Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit. She studies the effects of childhood adversity, which research suggests is responsible for up to one-third of all mental health disorders. Dunn is particularly interested in the timing of these adverse events and in uncovering whether there are sensitive periods during child development when exposure to adversity is particularly harmful. Yet Dunn notes that she and other scientists lack effective tools for measuring exposure to childhood adversity. Asking people (or their parents) about painful experiences in their early years is one method, but that’s vulnerable to poor recall or reluctance to share difficult memories. “That’s a hindrance for this field,” says Dunn.

Gamma ray discovery could advance understanding of UFOs’ role in the evolution of galaxies

Black holes can launch extremely powerful winds, so they’re not eating everything. They are like powerful vacuum cleaners that eject some of the dirt that gets near it instead of sucking in everything. These ejections, which are tsunami-like winds, are made of highly ionized gas. When they interact with the interstellar medium, they create powerful shock waves. – Marco Ajello, an associate professor in Clemson College of Science’s Department of Physics and Astronomy who is co-leading the study.

Using data gathered by the Large Area Telescope onboard NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and a stacking technique combining signals too weak to be observed on their own, researchers detected gamma rays from UFOs in several nearby galaxies for the first time, providing a basis for scientists to understand what happened in our own Milky Way galaxy.

UFOs are ultra-fast outflows — powerful winds launched from very near supermassive black holes that scientists believe play an important role in regulating the growth of the black hole itself and its host galaxy.

Clemson University scientists’ collaborative research is published in The Astrophysical Journal. Partners include the College of Charleston, the University of Chicago, and a host of other researchers who are part of the Fermi-LAT Collaboration, which includes hundreds of scientists from 12 countries. “Gamma rays from Fast Black-Hole Winds” outlines the detection of gamma-ray emission from UFOs launched by supermassive black holes.