Cutting air pollution emissions would save 50,000 U.S. lives, $600 billion each year

Image by Ralf Vetterle from Pixabay

Eliminating air pollution emissions from energy-related activities in the United States would prevent more than 50,000 premature deaths each year and provide more than $600 billion in benefits each year from avoided illness and death, according to a new study by University of Wisconsin–Madison researchers.

Published today in the journal GeoHealth, the study reports the health benefits of removing dangerous fine particulates released into the air by electricity generation, transportation, industrial activities and building functions like heating and cooking — also major sources of carbon dioxide emissions that cause climate change, since they predominantly rely on burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas.

“Our work provides a sense of the scale of the air quality health benefits that could accompany deep decarbonization of the U.S. energy system,” says Nick Mailloux, lead author of the study and a graduate student at the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment in UW–Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. “Shifting to clean energy sources can provide enormous benefit for public health in the near term while mitigating climate change in the longer term.”

Validation brings new predictive capability to global megafire smoke impacts

Recent megafires in Australia and British Columbia have injected unprecedented amounts of smoke into the stratosphere. Modeling led by Los Alamos National Laboratory will help predict the effects of similar future events.
Credit: David Peterson, FIREX-AQ

New research modeling smoke from two recent megafires sets the stage for better forecasting of how emissions from these global-scale events will behave and impact temperatures. As huge wildfires become more common under climate change, increased attention has focused on the intensity and duration of their emissions, which rival those of some volcano eruptions.

Megafires in British Columbia in 2017 and Australia in 2019-2020 injected massive amounts of smoke into the stratosphere, allowing first-ever detailed satellite- and ground-based measurements of such cataclysms. Using that data for validation, a Los Alamos National Laboratory–led team modeled the behavior and impacts of the smoke as it rose from the lower atmosphere into the high-riding stratosphere, then circulated the globe. The research appeared in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres.

Lighting up breast tumors during surgery

Scanning electron microscopy image of a breast cancer cell.
Credit: Bruce Wetzel & Harry Schaefer,
courtesy of the National Cancer Institute.

Nearly 13 percent of women born in the U.S. today will develop breast cancer at some point during their lives. Treatment for early-stage disease often includes breast-conserving surgery, where the tumor and some surrounding healthy tissues (the tumor margin) are removed. However, around 20 percent of these surgeries require a second operation, generally because cancer cells are found within the tumor margins.

Now, NIBIB-funded researchers are developing an imaging method that would allow surgeons to better identify cancerous cells in the tumor margins during surgery. This technique could lead to a reduction in follow-up breast cancer surgeries and reduce rates of breast cancer recurrence. Results were recently published in eBioMedicine, a publication of The Lancet.

“Today, surgeons primarily rely on their sense of sight and touch to distinguish between healthy and cancerous tissues during surgery, which may lead to incomplete removal of the tumor,” said Tatjana Atanasijevic, Ph.D., manager of the NIBIB program in Molecular Probes and Imaging Agents. “This imaging technique provides real-time visual feedback during surgery, allowing surgeons to better gauge the breast tumor margins, and ultimately optimizing surgical excision.”

The technique relies on a method known as near-infrared imaging, which utilizes probes that fluoresce under near-infrared light. These fluorescent probes can allow clinicians to visualize features beyond the tissue surface, such as blood vessels or tumors, which can help to guide surgical procedures. However, there aren’t many near-infrared agents that are approved for clinical use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and those that are approved are non-specific, meaning that they don’t home in on a specific target in the body. Further, the only near-infrared probe approved for surgery, indocyanine green (ICG), doesn't stay in the bloodstream for very long and therefore its utility for image-guided tumor resection is somewhat limited.

Green robotics start-up signs deal with energy giant

University of Bristol alumni and founders of Perceptual Robotics: Chief Operating Officer Dimitris Nikolaidis, Chief Technical Officer Kevin Driscoll-Lind and Chief Executive Officer Kostas Karachalios
Credit: University of Bristol

A start-up with University of Bristol roots has signed a deal with energy giant Enel to help keep its estimated 9,000 turbines spinning.

Perceptual Robotics use autonomous drones and artificial intelligence to detect damage in wind turbines early.

Now the company, founded by three Bristol alumni, has landed a deal to inspect turbines owned by Enel Green Power, a subsidiary of Enel, which is one of the biggest energy companies in the world.

Enel Green Power will use the data to carry out preventative maintenance - reducing costs and turbine stoppages while increasing safety.

Meanwhile, research published today shows that Perceptual Robotics’ technology is 14% better at detecting damage than expert humans carrying out the same inspections.

Perceptual Robotics says it can reduce the cost of wind turbine blade maintenance by 30%.

Kostas Karachalios, CEO of Perceptual Robotics, who studied for a Master of Engineering (MEng) at Bristol, said: “The task of inspecting and maintaining these structures is becoming ever more challenging, as the industry is increasingly recognized.

Using Bacteria to Accelerate CO2 Capture in Oceans

Berkeley Lab researcher Peter Agbo was awarded a grant for a carbon capture project under the Lab’s Carbon Negative Initiative.
Credit: Marilyn Sargent/Berkeley Lab

You may be familiar with direct air capture, or DAC, in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere in an effort to slow the effects of climate change. Now a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has proposed a scheme for direct ocean capture. Removing CO2 from the oceans will enable them to continue to do their job of absorbing excess CO2 from the atmosphere.

Experts mostly agree that combating climate change will take more than halting emissions of climate-warming gases. We must also remove the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that have already been emitted, to the tune of gigatons of CO2 removed each year by 2050 in order to achieve net zero emissions. The oceans contain significantly more CO2 than the atmosphere and have been acting as an important carbon sink for our planet.

Deaths from Alcohol Use Disorder Surged During Pandemic

Deaths related to alcohol use disorder dramatically increased over projections during the COVID-19 pandemic, Cedars-Sinai investigators found

Deaths involving alcohol use disorder increased dramatically during the pandemic, according to a new study by Cedars-Sinai investigators. The study also found that young adults 25 to 44 years old experienced the steepest upward trend in alcohol use disorder mortality.

In the study, published in the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Network Open, investigators used predictive modeling to compare expected—also called projected—alcohol use disorder mortality rates to actual rates. They found that alcohol use disorder-related mortality rates increased among all ages and sexes during the pandemic.

“During the first few months of the pandemic, my colleagues and I saw increased numbers of patients being treated for acute

alcohol use-related conditions in the intensive care unit and throughout the medical center,” said Yee Hui Yeo, MD, MSc, lead author of the study. “We also became aware of reports from single centers of elevated alcohol use-related complications. That prompted us to think, maybe this is a significant public health crisis.”

Ancient grains

Laura Motta, University of Michigan paleoethnobotanist, shows peas excavated from the Karanis site in Egypt.
Image credit: Eric Bronson, Michigan Photography

For a long time, researchers believed the diets of ancient people were nutritionally poor.

Everyday ancient Mediterranean civilizations relied on a diet of grains and pulses (chickpeas, lentils and other members of the bean family). Researchers thought this food lacked micronutrients such as zinc and iron, while also containing components that inhibit the uptake of what nutrients the food did have.

But a University of Michigan pilot study on crops grown in Egypt during Roman times suggests that ancient grains were more nutrient dense than grains grown in the same region today. Now, building on that study, U-M is part of a five-university consortium to receive a €3.7 million grant (about $3.85 million), called the AGROS project, awarded by the Belgian program Excellence of Science.

The researchers will use cutting-edge technologies to examine the nutritional profile of the food and how its nutrients changed based on the historical methods of food preparation.

Transgender mental health in crisis

Trans and LGBTIQA+ organizations across Australia are facing huge demand from the trans community for inclusive and affirming mental health services.
Image: The Gender Spectrum Collection

Australia’s transgender (trans) community is experiencing depression and thoughts of self-harm at levels never before seen, but many are not getting the help they need because they’re afraid to access mainstream services, a new study has shown.

Authored by the University of Melbourne’s Trans Health Research Group, the Trans in the Pandemic: Stories of Struggle and Resilience in the Australia Trans Community report has found 61 per cent of the 1019 people surveyed in 2020 experienced clinical depression – that’s twice the national rate and much higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The team also found 49 per cent of trans people experienced thoughts of self-harm or suicide compared to 14.9 per cent for the general Australian population who reported thoughts of self-harm or suicide in the initial months of the pandemic.

The survey was carried out in May and June 2020, when there was concern the trans community may be disproportionately affected by social distancing restrictions, and healthcare and employment disruptions.

Report lead author Sav Zwickl said it was already well-established prior to the pandemic that the trans community faced numerous health disparities and was one of the most medically and socially marginalized groups in society.

Experimental COVID-19 vaccine provides mutation-resistant T cell protection in mice

Marulasiddappa Suresh
Credit: UWM

A second line of defense — the immune system’s T cells — may offer protection from COVID-19 even when vaccine-induced antibodies no longer can, according to new research out of the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine.

The researchers discovered that a new, protein-based vaccine against the original version of the COVID-19 virus was able to teach mouse T cells how to recognize and kill cells infected with new, mutated versions of the virus. This T cell protection worked even when antibodies lost their ability to recognize and neutralize mutated SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

“Antibodies prevent COVID-19 infection, but if new variants escape these antibodies, T cells are there to provide a second line of protection,” explains lead scientist Marulasiddappa Suresh, a professor of immunology and associate dean for research at the School of Veterinary Medicine.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, investigates the role of T cells, a specialized type of white blood cell, in defending against COVID-19 when antibodies fail.

When you receive a COVID-19 vaccine, your body learns to produce antibodies, proteins in the immune system that bind to and neutralize SARS-CoV-2. These antibodies circulate in the blood stream and protect you from illness by patrolling the nostrils, airways and lungs and wiping out the virus before it can cause infection or disease.

The genetic origins of the world's first farmers clarified

Ancient DNA extraction in Mainz’s lab. Work done in sterile conditions to avoid contamination from modern DNA.
Credit: Joachim Burger / JGU

The genetic origins of the first agriculturalists in the Neolithic period long seemed to lie in the Near East. A new study published in the journal Cell shows that the first farmers actually represented a mixture of Ice Age hunter-gatherer groups, spread from the Near East all the way to south-eastern Europe. Researchers from the University of Bern and the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics as well as from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the University of Fribourg were involved in the study. The method they developed could help reveal other human evolution patterns with unmatched resolution. 

The first signs of agriculture and a sedentary lifestyle are found in the so-called 'Fertile Crescent', a region in the Near East where people began to settle down and domesticate animals and plants about 11,000 years ago. The question of the origin of agriculture and sedentism has occupied researchers for over 100 years: did farming spread from the Near East through cultural diffusion or through migration? Genetic analyses of prehistoric skeletons so far supported the idea that Europe's first farmers were descended from hunter-gatherer populations in Anatolia. While that may well be the case, this new study shows that the Neolithic genetic origins cannot clearly be attributed to a single region. Unexpected and complex population dynamics occurred at the end of the Ice Age, and led to the ancestral genetic makeup of the populations who invented agriculture and a sedentary lifestyle i.e. the first Neolithic farmers. 

The first farmers emerged from a mixing process starting 14,000 years ago 

Previous analyses had suggested that the first Neolithic people were genetically different from other human groups from that time. Little was known about their origins. Nina Marchi, one of the study's first authors from the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Bern and SIB says: "We now find that the first farmers of Anatolia and Europe emerged from a population admixed between hunter-gatherers from Europe and the Near East." According to the authors, the mixing process started around 14,000 years ago, which was followed by a period of extreme genetic differentiation lasting several thousand years. 

A novel approach to model population history from prehistoric skeletons 

The Klein7 individual from the Kleinhadersdorf site in the Lower Austrian Weinviertel, whose genome was analyzed in the paper.
Credit: BDA / Christine Neugebauer-Maresch

This research was made possible by combining two techniques: the production of high-quality ancient genomes from prehistoric skeletons, coupled with demographic modeling on the resulting data. The research team coined the term "demo genomic modeling" for this purpose. "It is necessary to have genome data of the best possible quality so that the latest statistical genomic methods can reconstruct the subtle demographic processes of the last 30 thousand years at high resolution", says Laurent Excoffier, one of the senior authors of the study. Laurent Excoffier is a professor at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Bern and group leader at SIB. He initiated the project together with Joachim Burger of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and Daniel Wegmann of the University of Fribourg. Nina Marchi adds: "Simply comparing the similarity of different ancient genomes is not enough to understand how they evolved. We had to reconstruct the actual histories of the populations studied as accurately as possible. This is only possible with complex population genetic statistics." 

Interdisciplinary key to solve such ancient puzzles 

Joachim Burger of the University of Mainz and second senior author emphasizes the necessity of interdisciplinarity: "It took close to ten years to gather and analyze the skeletons suitable for such a study. This was only possible by collaborating with numerous archaeologists and anthropologists, who helped us to anchor our models historically". The historical contextualization was coordinated by Maxime Brami, who works with Burger at Johannes Gutenberg University. The young prehistorian was surprised by some of the study's findings: "Europe's first farmers seem to be descended from hunter-gatherer populations that lived all the way from the Near East to the Balkans. This was not foreseeable archaeologically". 

Towards a general model of human population evolution 

Genetic data from fossils (skeletons) are badly damaged and must be processed accordingly using bioinformatics, as Daniel Wegmann from the University of Fribourg and group leader at SIB explains: "The high-resolution reconstruction of the prehistory of the Europeans was only possible thanks to methods that we specifically developed to analyze
ancient fossil genomes." Joachim Burger adds: "With these approaches, we have not only elucidated the origins of the world's first Neolithic populations, but we have established a general model of the evolution of human populations in Southwest Asia and Europe." 

"Of course, spatial and temporal gaps remain, and this does not imply the end of studies on the evolution of humans in this area", concludes Laurent Excoffier. Thus, the team's research plan is already set; they want to supplement their demographic model with genomes from the later phases of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages to provide an increasingly detailed picture of human evolution. 

Source/Credit: University of Bern

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