This protein can shred our cells. Or it can help us think.

A 3D ultrahigh-resolution image shows how complexin can distort, shred and elongate simulated cellular membranes. Complexin is important for releasing neurotransmitters in the brain, but must be regulated to not damage cells
Credit: The Chapman Lab

A new study reveals that a protein long known to play a role in communication between cells in the brain is also capable of obliterating cells if left unchecked because of its penchant for twisting and puncturing the membranes surrounding cells.

On its own, the protein — known as complexin — is so toxic it can shred cells. Yet, in the brain, a suite of controls makes sure the protein plays nice and helps cells called neurons communicate by aiding in the release of compounds called neurotransmitters.

The findings, published in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, emphasize how little we still know about how our brains work. Billions of times every second, the brain’s neurons pass information to one another. While many proteins play a role in this crucial task, just how they accomplish it remains stubbornly mysterious.

It all starts inside a neuron when a tiny packet of neurotransmitters fuses with the cell’s outer membrane. That packet then gets released as cargo to make its way to the next neuron.

Big Data Imaging Shows Rock’s Big Role in Channeling Earthquakes in Japan

The aftermath of a 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
Credit: Direct Relief/Flickr

Thanks to 20 years of seismic data processed through one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, scientists have created the first complete, 3D visualization of a mountain-size rock called the Kumano Pluton buried miles beneath the coast of southern Japan. They can now see the rock could be acting like a lightning rod for the region’s megaquakes, diverting tectonic energy into points along its sides where several of the region’s largest earthquakes have happened.

Scientists have known about the pluton for years but were aware of only small portions of it. Thanks to new research by an international team of scientists led by The University of Texas at Austin, researchers now have a view of the entire subterranean formation and its effect on the region’s tectonics.

Climate change can worsen impact of invasive plants

Whalen Dillon recording data in the experiment to assess the effects of invasion, drought and their interaction on longleaf pine responses to fire.
Credit: UF/IFAS Camila Guillen

Synergy isn’t always a good thing — take climate change and invasive plants.

Scientists have long hypothesized that climate change, by intensifying stressors like drought or wildfires, would make an ecosystem more vulnerable to invasive plants. Those invasive plants may in turn alter the environment in ways that amplify the impacts of climate change, explained Luke Flory, a professor of ecology in the UF/IFAS agronomy department.

A new long-term field study conducted by Flory’s lab offers the first experimental evidence to support this hypothesis.

The study, published in the journal Ecology Letters, exposed small plots of long-leaf pine to three scenarios: drought conditions, colonization by the invasive plant cogongrass and a combination of these two factors.

To test how the different scenarios influenced the trees’ survival, scientists added another stressor: fire. But before lighting the first fire, the team waited almost six years for the trees to grow under each scenario.

Nasal Spray Booster Keeps COVID-19 at Bay

A nasal spray coronavirus vaccine booster helps protect mice from SARS-CoV-2. In this electron microscopy image, viral particles are shown as blue circles.
Credit: CDC/ Hannah A Bullock; Azaibi Tamin

A new coronavirus vaccine guards one body part especially vulnerable to infection: the nose.

Dosing mice with a nasal spray booster recruited an army of immune defenders to both the nasal cavity, where coronaviruses typically enter the body, and the lungs, scientists report in a preprint posted on bioRxiv.org.

Made only of coronavirus spike protein, the vaccine is part of a one-two punch that could one day protect people from infection. Dubbed “Prime and Spike,” the strategy relies on an mRNA coronavirus vaccine injection that primes the immune system to recognize SARS-CoV-2, followed by a nasal spray vaccine that shores up defenses at the mucus membranes.

Such a strategy might offer a way to counter the waning effectiveness of current mRNA coronavirus vaccines, says study author Akiko Iwasaki, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at Yale University.

Until now, scientists had not tested nasal vaccines on animals that already had some pre-existing immunity, says Jacco Boon, a virologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who was not involved with the new work. “This paper is telling us that the intranasal booster induces a really good immune response in the nose and the lungs,” he says. “It’s a clever strategy, and I hope they test it in people.”

Self-assembling and complex, nanoscale mesocrystals can be tuned for a variety of uses

A magnified view reveals nanoscale mesocrystals (inset) starting to assemble and form an ordered supracrystal structure, seen in green.
Credit: Inna Soroka

A research team from KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces report to have found the key to controlled fabrication of cerium oxide mesocrystals. The research is a step forward in tuning nanomaterials that can serve a wide range of uses —including solar cells, fuel catalysts and even medicine.

Mesocrystals are nanoparticles with identical size, shape and crystallographic orientation, and they can be used as building blocks to create artificial nanostructures with customized optical, magnetic or electronic properties.

In nature, these three-dimensional structures are found in coral, sea urchins and calcite desert rose. Artificially-produced cerium oxide (CeO2) mesocrystals—or nanoceria—are well-known as catalysts, with antioxidant properties that could be useful in pharmaceutical development.

The early cooling of the universe

A look into the past: Cosmic microwave radiation (left) was released 380,000 years after the Big Bang and serves as the background for all galaxies in the universe. The starburst galaxy HFLS3 (centre) is embedded in a cloud of cold-water vapor and appears as it did 880 million years after the Big Bang. Because of its low temperature, the water casts a dark shadow on the microwave background (detail enlargement on the left). This represents a contrast about 10,000-fold stronger than its intrinsic variations of only 0.001% (light/dark spots). 
Credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration; zoom-in panel: Dominik Riechers/University of Cologne; image composition: Martina Markus/University of Cologne

The shadow of a cosmic water cloud reveals the temperature of the young universe

A telescope in the French Alps has allowed researchers to peer deep into the past of the universe. For the first time, they were able to observe an extremely distant hydrogen cloud that shadows the cosmic background radiation created shortly after the Big Bang. The shadow is created because the colder water absorbs the warmer background radiation on its way to Earth. This provides information about the temperature of the cosmos just 880 million years after the Big Bang. To measure the early history of the universe, an international team used the Northern Extended Millimeter Array (NOEMA), the most powerful radio telescope in the northern hemisphere.

The universe came into being around 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang. At that time, a hot, dense fog of radiation and elementary particles wafted in space, which was rapidly expanding. The density and temperature decreased just as quickly, and the light particles (photons) lost increasingly more energy. After about 380,000 years, this plasma had cooled down to 3000 Kelvin. It was then possible for stable atoms to be created. And the photons had a free path and spread out into space. The cosmos became transparent so to speak.

Don’t lose your marbles: realizing the potential of liquid marbles

Griffith University researchers have solved a problem plaguing droplet-sized micro-reactors which could improve the viability for applications like drug delivery and waste management.

Published in Applied Physics Letters, the technique the team developed uses condensation to noninvasively refill the liquid marbles that previously collapse due to evaporation.

“Liquid marbles are droplets of solution that we wrap in a thin layer of microparticles which can be used for a number of biological, chemical, and biochemical applications,” said co-author Professor Nam-Trung Nguyen from the Queensland Micro and Nanotechnology Centre.

“Liquid marbles are used as microreactors to house various chemical, biochemical and biological purposes like growing cells and applications such as the common PCR, a DNA amplification technique used to detect COVID-19.

“Utilizing liquid marbles for these purposes significantly reduces the amounts of reactants and plastic consumables needed.”

To create the marbles a drop of the reaction solution is rolled over a powder bed of hydrophobic (water resistant) particles or oleophobic (oil resistant) particles, so they create a barrier around the drop that isolates its content from the surrounding.

Dog feces and urine could be harming nature reserves

Sign prohibiting dogs at one of the nature reserves.
Credit: Pieter De Frenne

New research finds that dogs being walked in nature reserves contribute a significant amount of nutrients to the environment through their feces and urine, which researchers warn could negatively impact local biodiversity. The research is published in the British Ecological Society journal, Ecological Solutions and Evidence.

Significant levels of fertilization

Researchers at Ghent University have estimated that each year dog feces and urine add an average of 11kg of nitrogen and 5kg of phosphorous per hectare to nature reserves near the Belgian city of Ghent. The researchers say that the nutrients added through this neglected form of fertilizations are substantial and could be detrimental to biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.

The estimates for the amount of nitrogen being added by this previously unrecorded source are particularly significant when compared to the total levels of nitrogen being added across most of Europe through fossil fuel emissions and agriculture, which range from 5 to 25kg of nitrogen per hectare.

Professor Pieter De Frenne of Ghent University and lead author of the research said: “We were surprised by how high nutrient inputs from dogs could be. Atmospheric nitrogen inputs from agriculture, industry and traffic rightfully receive a lot of policy attention, but dogs are entirely neglected in this respect.”

Five tips for nature-based solutions to combat climate change consequences

The recreational value of a landscape is also taken
 into account in nature-based solutions.
Credit: RUB, Marquard

What works in pilot projects does not have to work in real life.

In order to stop climate change and reduce its consequences, nature-based solutions are well suited: Inspired or supported by nature, they can preserve biodiversity and prevent flooding from flooding. Their implementation works in pilot projects - but how can they be implemented on a large scale under normal conditions? A team from Müncheberg, Hanover, Leipzig, Potsdam and Bochum proposes five principles - among other things, to take advantage of the opportunities of the Corona crisis. The suggestions are on 8. February 2022 published in the magazine npj Urban Sustainability.

Inspired by nature

Nature-based solutions master ecological, social and economic challenges in a way that is inspired or supported by nature. This includes green infrastructure that cushions the effects of climate change in cities, the restoration of meadows and wetlands, the effects of flooding rivers, and measures in agriculture to preserve biodiversity. Many countries see nature-based solutions as a central contribution to reducing and adapting to climate change. They can help achieve global sustainability goals, such as health and well-being, sustainable cities and towns, and sustainable land use.

Mineral dating reveals new clues about important tectonic process

Mantle Peridotite in the Samail Ophiolite, Oman

Ancient rocks on the coast of Oman that were once driven deep down toward Earth’s mantle may reveal new insights into subduction, an important tectonic process that fuels volcanoes and creates continents, according to an international team of scientists.

“In a broad sense this work gives us a better understanding of why some subduction zones fail while others set up as long-term, steady-state systems,” said Joshua Garber, assistant research professor of geosciences at Penn State.

Subduction occurs when two tectonic plates collide, and one is forced under the other. Where oceanic and continental plates meet, the denser oceanic plates normally subduct and descend into the mantle, the scientists said.

Occasionally, oceanic plates move on top, or obduct, forcing continental plates down toward the mantle instead. But the buoyancy of the continental crust can cause the subduction to fail, carrying the material back toward the surface along with slabs of oceanic crust and upper mantle called ophiolites, the scientists said.

“The Samail Ophiolite on the Arabian Peninsula is one of the largest and best exposed examples on the surface of the Earth,” Garber said. “It’s one of the best studied, but there have been disagreements about how and when the subduction occurred.”