Restoring abandoned agricultural land in the Murray-Darling Basin

Abandoned agricultural land in the Murray Darling Basin.
Photo credit: Peta Zivec

A Griffith study has found the number of diverse seeds stored in abandoned land in the Murray-Darling Basin and essential paddock trees, make the region highly resilient to agriculture.

Published in Restoration Ecology, the study investigated the ability of semi-arid landscapes in the northern MDB to store seeds in soil seed banks, animal scat and in leaf litter and assessed the species richness, abundance and composition of these seed banks.

“Restoring abandoned agricultural lands is vital for the Murray-Darling Basin to revive the key ecological functions and services the river and its surrounding regions once provided,” said Dr Peta Zivec, a research fellow at the Australian Rivers Institute

“With large-scale regeneration projects being extremely costly and labor intensive, natural regeneration, where the vegetation regrows via the seeds already stored within the landscape, can be a cost-effective alternative approach to restoring large agricultural areas.

Technology for Conditioning Radioactive Waste Developed in Ural Region

The containers have a metal insert with a sorbent.
Photo credit: EKSORB press-service

Ural specialists have developed and tested a technology for conditioning (conversion from liquid to solid state) of liquid radioactive waste. The traditional scheme involves mixing sorbent enriched with radioactive isotopes of cesium-134 and 137 and cobalt-60 during the purification of liquid radioactive waste with cement mortar and placing it in special concrete protective containers. However, this requires a large number of containers, which increases the cost of processing and the volume of storage facilities to place the containers. Composite inorganic sorbents have been gaining popularity lately because they concentrate radionuclides very well from a large volume of liquid with a small volume of the sorbents themselves.

Scientists have developed a technology that makes it possible to condition liquid radioactive waste and then safely store the resulting solid waste. The technology is being developed by the EKSORB Scientific Production Enterprise (Ekaterinburg) with the support of the Foundation for Assistance to Innovations and in cooperation with the Ural Federal University.

The specialists tested the technology on a pilot plant. It was used to clean more than three cubic meters of liquid radioactive waste of BN-350 Reactor. As a result, the activity of cesium-137 decreased from 78 million Bq/L to 20 Bq/L, cobalt-60 - from 10 thousand Bq/L to less than 400 Bq/L. The clean concrete product was obtained from the cleaned solutions. After cleaning, the resulting solid waste can be stored safely, the developers assure.

The cell sentinel that neutralizes hepatitis B

Confocal microscopy images showing in the cell nucleus (blue), the recruitment of Smc5/6 (green) by SLF2 (red) into PML bodies.
Credit: UNIGE - Laboratory of Professor Michel Strubin - Regulation of hepatitis B virus gene expression - Department of Microbiology and Molecular Medicine.

The hepatitis B virus (HBV) is responsible for one of the most serious and common infectious diseases. Transmitted through biological fluids, it attacks the liver cells. The chronic form of the disease can lead to serious complications, including cirrhosis and liver cancer. There is no effective treatment for the chronic form of the disease, which can only be prevented by vaccination. After identifying a key protein complex that is active when our body is infected by the virus, a team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) has deciphered the precise functioning of this protective mechanism, opening the way to new therapeutic targets. These results can be read in the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology.

Hepatitis B is the most common form of hepatitis. It is a viral disease caused by the hepatitis B virus. It is mainly blood or sexually transmitted. It is up to 100 times more contagious than HIV. By infecting the liver cells, this virus causes a transitory inflammation of this organ that can also evolve towards a chronic infection. This can then lead to serious pathologies, such as cirrhosis or liver cancer. It is estimated that nearly one million people die each year from this disease worldwide. There is no definitive treatment for chronic hepatitis B. The only way to prevent it is to be vaccinated before the disease appears.

In 2016, a UNIGE team led by Michel Strubin, an associate professor in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Medicine and in the Geneva Centre for Inflammation Research at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine, revealed a mechanism that is crucial for understanding this disease: when our immune system defends itself against it, a complex - i.e. an interdependent set - of six proteins called SMC5/6, present in our cells, detects the viral DNA and blocks it. The virus then strikes back and produces a specific protein, the X protein. This protein enters the cell and degrades SMC5/6, which is no longer able to play its sentinel role.

Coronavirus formation is successfully modeled

Roya Zandi (left) and Siyu Li. (UCR/Zandi lab)
Source: University of California, Riverside

A physicist at the University of California, Riverside, and her former graduate student have successfully modeled the formation of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that spreads COVID-19, for the first time.

In a paper published in Viruses, a journal, Roya Zandi, a professor of physics and astronomy at UCR, and Siyu Li, a postdoctoral researcher at Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory in China, offer an overall understanding of the assembly and formation of SARS-CoV-2 from its constituent components.

“Understanding viral assembly has always been a key step leading to therapeutic strategies,” Zandi said. “Numerous experiments and simulations of viruses such as HIV and hepatitis B virus have had a remarkable impact on elucidating their assembly and providing means to combat them. Even the simplest questions regarding the formation of SARS-CoV-2 remain unanswered.”

Zandi explained that a critical step in the life cycle of any virus is the packaging of its genome into new virions or virus particles. This is an especially challenging task for coronaviruses, like SARS-CoV-2, with their very large RNA genomes. Indeed, coronaviruses have the largest genome known for a virus that uses RNA as its genetic material.

Small eddies play a big role in feeding ocean microbes

This video still of the North Pacific Ocean shows phosphate nutrient concentrations at 500 meters below the ocean surface. The swirls represent small eddies transporting phosphate from the nutrient-rich equator (lighter colors), northward toward the nutrient-depleted subtropics (darker colors).
Credit: Courtesy of the researchers

Subtropical gyres are enormous rotating ocean currents that generate sustained circulations in the Earth’s subtropical regions just to the north and south of the equator. These gyres are slow-moving whirlpools that circulate within massive basins around the world, gathering up nutrients, organisms, and sometimes trash, as the currents rotate from coast to coast.

For years, oceanographers have puzzled over conflicting observations within subtropical gyres. At the surface, these massive currents appear to host healthy populations of phytoplankton — microbes that feed the rest of the ocean food chain and are responsible for sucking up a significant portion of the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide.

But judging from what scientists know about the dynamics of gyres, they estimated the currents themselves wouldn’t be able to maintain enough nutrients to sustain the phytoplankton they were seeing. How, then, were the microbes able to thrive?

Now, MIT researchers have found that phytoplankton may receive deliveries of nutrients from outside the gyres, and that the delivery vehicle is in the form of eddies — much smaller currents that swirl at the edges of a gyre. These eddies pull nutrients in from high-nutrient equatorial regions and push them into the center of a gyre, where the nutrients are then taken up by other currents and pumped to the surface to feed phytoplankton.

La Niña winters could keep on coming

In the Pacific Northwest, La Niña winters tend to be colder and wetter than average. The past two winters have fit that description, including this February 2021 snowfall in Seattle’s Volunteer Park. Credit: Seattle Parks and Recreation/Flickr

Forecasters are predicting a “three-peat La Niña” this year. This will be the third winter in a row that the Pacific Ocean has been in a La Niña cycle, something that’s happened only twice before in records going back to 1950.

New research led by the University of Washington offers a possible explanation. The study, recently published in Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that climate change is, in the short term, favoring La Niñas.

“The Pacific Ocean naturally cycles between El Niño and La Niña conditions, but our work suggests that climate change could currently be weighing the dice toward La Niña,” said lead author Robert Jnglin Wills, a UW research scientist in atmospheric sciences. “At some point, we expect anthropogenic, or human-caused, influences to reverse these trends and give El Niño the upper hand.”

Scientists hope to predict the direction of these longer-term El Niño-like or La Niña-like climate trends in order to protect human life and property.

“This is an important question over the next century for regions that are strongly influenced by El Niño, which includes western North America, South America, East and Southeast Asia and Australia,” Wills said.

Specialized smart soft contact lenses can address global issues of glaucoma diagnosis and management

New smart soft contact lens technology developed by a multidisciplinary team of engineers and health care researchers at Purdue University and Indiana University School of Optometry looks to gather important intraocular pressure measurements for 24-hour cycles as a way to detect glaucoma.
Credit: Purdue University photo/Rebecca McElhoe

The vision of Purdue University biomedical engineer Chi Hwan Lee to develop specialized smart soft contact lenses that can accurately measure intraocular pressure (IOP) in a person’s eye could be the latest answer to stopping glaucoma-related blindness.

Lee, the Leslie A. Geddes Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering in Purdue’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, led a research team that developed new ocular technology to continuously monitor patients’ IOP readings more comfortably and accurately.

The technology serves as another option for eye specialists to identify glaucoma, which, according to the Glaucoma Research Foundation, can steal a person’s vision without early warning signs or pain and affects more than 80 million people worldwide.

The only known modifiable risk factor is lowering a person’s IOP, which is difficult to monitor for long periods of time, particularly during sleep.

While exams can be performed in a specialist’s office and at-home monitoring systems are available, these all have their limitations. For instance, in-office measures are time-consuming, and current at-home technology is difficult to use, is uncomfortable and doesn’t gather sufficient data at the right time periods or over long enough time periods for specialists to appropriately use the information to make optimized treatment decisions.

Not enough: Protecting algae-eating fish insufficient to save imperiled coral reefs

Bright blue Chromis fish on acropora coral at a back reef on the French Polynesian island of Mo’orea.
 Image credit: Kelly Speare

How can we boost the resilience of the world’s coral reefs, which are imperiled by multiple stresses including mass bleaching events linked to climate warming?

One strategy advocated by some researchers, resource managers and conservationists is to restore populations of algae-eating reef fish, such as parrotfish. Protecting the fish that keep algae in check leads to healthier corals and can promote the recovery of distressed reefs, according to this idea, which is known as fish-mediated resilience.

But a new study that analyzed long-term data from 57 coral reefs around the French Polynesian island of Mo’orea challenges this canon of coral reef ecology.

The study, published online Oct. 3 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, provides compelling new evidence that fish don’t regulate coral over time, according to University of Michigan marine ecologist and study co-senior author Jacob Allgeier. The other author is former U-M postdoctoral researcher Timothy Cline.

North Carolina Lake Sediments Show Decades of Coal Ash Contamination

Bottom sediments from five North Carolina lakes near coal-fired power plants shows coal ash contamination that likely entered the lakes by three different routes.
Credit: Avner Vengosh

An analysis of sediments from five North Carolina lakes near coal-burning power plants has found that coal ash pollution of surface waters has been more persistent and widespread than was previously known.

The findings, from scientists at Duke University and Appalachian State University, show that large quantities of coal ash have been transferred and deposited in lake sediments since the beginning of coal operations in North Carolina.

“The bottom sediments of a lake represent a complete history of what has fallen into the lake water and settled to the bottom,” said Avner Vengosh, a Duke University Distinguished Professor of Environmental Quality at the Nicholas School of the Environment. “Using our age-dating methods, we were able to go back in time, in some cases even before the coal plant was built, and reconstruct the history of the lakes.”

Coal ash is the residual material from burning coal to generate electricity, and is known to contain hazardous metals including lead, chromium, cadmium, mercury, arsenic, selenium and molybdenum, many of which have been tied to human cancers and other health effects.

AI boosts usability of paper-making waste products

Photo and graphic with birch tree by J. Löfgren

In a new and exciting collaboration with the Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems, researchers in the CEST group have published a study demonstrating how artificial intelligence (AI) can boost the production of renewable biomaterials. Their publication focuses on the extraction of lignin, an organic polymer that together with cellulose makes up the cell walls of plants. As a side-product of papermaking, lignin is produced in large quantities around the world but seldom used as anything other than cheap fuel. Developing valuable materials and chemicals from lignin would consequently be a big step towards a sustainable society.

A key challenge for the valorization of lignin is to find the right experimental extraction conditions. These include things like the temperature in the hot-water reactor where the wood is processed, the reaction time and the ratio of wood to water. These conditions not only affect the amount of lignin that can be extracted, but also the physical and chemical properties of the extracted lignin itself. Therefore, knowing how to choose the right experimental conditions is important since the more lignin can be extracted the better, and different lignin-based products may require lignin with different properties.