Gut parasites may increase onward transmission of respiratory bugs in rabbits

Bordatella bronchiseptica shedding on BG-blood agar petri dishes. Examples of (a) supershedding event and (b) average shedding event.
Credit: Isabella Cattadori, Penn State

Rabbits co-infected with a respiratory bacterial infection and one or more gut helminth parasites are more likely to shed bacteria that can infect others, according to a report led by researchers at Penn State and published today in the journal eLife.

The study suggests that co-infection is an important source of variation in pathogen shedding between individual animals and could influence how likely a disease is to spread. Species similar to the ones used in this study infect humans and while the study was done in rabbits it has broad implications for human populations.

Individual variation in pathogen transmission can increase the basic reproduction number — the R value — of a pathogen, and determine whether an infection will spread or stutter and quickly fade away. One of the causes of this variation is differences in the amount and duration of pathogen shedding, as some individuals shed more and for longer than others — so-called super-shedders. Co-infection with other pathogens is thought to contribute to variation in host infection, and so transmission, because of interactions between pathogen species and the immune response they trigger.

Injections for diabetes, cancer could become unnecessary

Young woman injecting insulin
Photo Credit: Pavel Danilyuk

Researchers at UC Riverside are paving the way for diabetes and cancer patients to forget needles and injections, and instead take pills to manage their conditions.

Some drugs for these diseases dissolve in water, so transporting them through the intestines, which receive what we drink and eat, is not feasible. As a result, these drugs cannot be administered by mouth. However, UCR scientists have created a chemical “tag” that can be added to these drugs, allowing them to enter blood circulation via the intestines.

The details of how they found the tag, and demonstrations of its effectiveness, are described in a new Journal of the American Chemical Society paper.

The tag is composed of a small peptide, which is like a protein fragment. “Because they are relatively small molecules, you can chemically attach them to drugs, or other molecules of interest, and use them to deliver those drugs orally,” said Min Xue, UCR chemistry professor who led the research.

Xue’s laboratory was testing something unrelated when the researchers observed these peptides making their way into cells.

The Cone Nebula as seen by the VLT

The Cone Nebula is part of a star-forming region of space, NGC 2264, about 2500 light-years away. Its pillar-like appearance is a perfect example of the shapes that can develop in giant clouds of cold molecular gas and dust, known for creating new stars. This dramatic new view of the nebula was captured with the FOcal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrograph 2 (FORS2) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), and released on the occasion of ESO’s 60th anniversary.
Full Size Image
Credit: ESO

For the past 60 years the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has been enabling scientists worldwide to discover the secrets of the Universe. We mark this milestone by bringing you a spectacular new image of a star factory, the Cone Nebula, taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT).

On 5 October 1962 five countries signed the convention to create ESO. Now, six decades later and supported by 16 Member States and strategic partners, ESO brings together scientists and engineers from across the globe to develop and operate advanced ground-based observatories in Chile that enable breakthrough astronomical discoveries.​

On the occasion of ESO’s 60th anniversary we are releasing this remarkable new image of the Cone Nebula, captured earlier this year with one of ESO’s telescopes and selected by ESO staff. This is part of a campaign marking ESO's 60th anniversary and taking place in late 2022, both on social media under the #ESO60years hashtag, and with local events in the ESO Member States and other countries.

Growing pure nanotubes is a stretch, but possible

There are dozens of varieties of nanotubes, each with a characteristic diameter and structural twist, or chiral angle. Carbon nanotubes are grown on catalytic particles using batch production methods that produce the entire gamut of chiral varieties, but Rice University scientists have come up with a new strategy for making batches with a single, desired chirality. Their theory shows chiral varieties can be selected for production when catalytic particles are drawn away at specific speeds by localized feedstock supply. The illustration depicts this and an analogous process 19th-century scientists used to describe the evolution of giraffes’ long necks due to the gradual selection of abilities to reach progressively higher for food.
Credit: Illustrations by Ksenia Bets/Rice University

Like a giraffe stretching for leaves on a tall tree, making carbon nanotubes reach for food as they grow may lead to a long-sought breakthrough.

Materials theorists Boris Yakobson and Ksenia Bets at Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering show how putting constraints on growing nanotubes could facilitate a “holy grail” of growing batches with a single desired chirality.

Their paper in Science Advances describes a strategy by which constraining the carbon feedstock in a furnace would help control the “kite” growth of nanotubes. In this method, the nanotube begins to form at the metal catalyst on a substrate, but lifts the catalyst as it grows, resembling a kite on a string.

Carbon nanotube walls are basically graphene, its hexagonal lattice of atoms rolled into a tube. Chirality refers to how the hexagons are angled within the lattice, between 0 and 30 degrees. That determines whether the nanotubes are metallic or semiconductors. The ability to grow long nanotubes in a single chirality could, for instance, enable the manufacture of highly conductive nanotube fibers or semiconductor channels of transistors.

Gadolinium Improved Conductivity of Hydrogen Energy Material Twenty-fold

Schematic and photograph of layered perovskites with gadolinium.
Illustration Credit: et al. journal Materials

Employees of the Institute of High Temperature Electrochemistry of the Urals Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Hydrogen Energy of Ural Federal University have created a new electrolyte material for hydrogen power. It is based on layered perovskites modified with rare-earth gadolinium, Indicator reports. Layered perovskites have good conductivity, and they can also be used to create systems that will convert the energy of chemical reactions into electricity. The development of the Ural scientists will make it possible to expand green energy technologies and thereby reduce carbon emissions. The research was supported by the Russian Science Foundation. The results of the work were published in the journal Materials.

Classical ABO3 perovskite (where A and B are two different elements and O is oxygen) is a network of octahedrons connected with each other by all vertices, and each oxygen atom is included in this network. In layered perovskites AA'BO4 octahedrons are connected in layers separated from each other by layers with a cubic structure of rock salt. It is more "flexible" than the classical perovskite, which may open up additional possibilities for its improvement.

The authors decided to modify the layered perovskites BaLaInO4 (Ba - barium, La - lanthanum, In - indium, O - oxygen) by adding atoms of the rare-earth gadolinium, which can also increase the conductivity of materials. In this case, this effect is due to the fact that the system originally had rare-earth ions - lanthanum - and the addition of their "relative" gadolinium led to more repulsion of octahedrons in the crystal lattice. As a result, the space for the transport of charged particles expanded.

Efficient mRNA delivery by branched lipids

A cross-section of an LNP-RNA. The mRNA (red) is encapsulated by lipids (blue spheres with tails.
 Image Credit: Yusuke Sato

A novel branched lipid that has a high stability in storage and a high efficiency in the delivery of mRNA to cells has been developed.

Messenger RNA (mRNA) are biological molecules that transfer the information coded by genes in the nucleus to the cytoplasm for protein synthesis by ribosomes. mRNA sequences can be designed to encode specific proteins; the most well-known example of this are the mRNA vaccines for COVID-19. mRNA molecules are large and chemically unstable, so a vector must be utilized to deliver mRNA to the cells. One of the most advanced technologies for the delivery of mRNA are lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), which are composed of ionizable lipids, cholesterol, helper lipids and polyethylene glycol.

A team of researchers led by Assistant Professor Yusuke Sato and Professor Hideyoshi Harashima at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Hokkaido University, and by Kazuki Hashiba at the Nitto Denko Corporation have developed a novel branched ionizable lipid which, when included in LNPs, greatly increases the efficiency of mRNA delivery. Their results were published in the journal Small Science.

Searching for traces of dark matter with neutron spin clocks

Part of the experimental apparatus in the laboratory in Bern with PhD student Ivo Schulthess.
Credit: zvg/mad/Courtesy of F. Piegsa

With the use of a precision experiment developed at the University of Bern, an international research team has succeeded in significantly narrowing the scope for the existence of dark matter. The experiment was carried out at the European Research Neutron Source at the Institute Laue-Langevin in France, and makes an important contribution to the search for these particles, of which little remains known.

Cosmological observations of the orbits of stars and galaxies enable clear conclusions to be drawn about the attractive gravitational forces that act between the celestial bodies. The astonishing finding: visible matter is far from sufficient for being able to explain the development or movements of galaxies. This suggests that there exists another, so far unknown, type of matter. Accordingly, in the year 1933, the Swiss physicist and astronomer Fritz Zwicky inferred the existence of what is known now as dark matter. Dark matter is a postulated form of matter which isn’t directly visible but interacts via gravity, and consists of approximately five times more mass than the matter with which we are familiar.

Recently, following a precision experiment developed at the Albert Einstein Center for Fundamental Physics (AEC) at the University of Bern, an international research team succeeded in significantly narrowing the scope for the existence of dark matter. With more than 100 members, the AEC is one of the leading international research organizations in the field of particle physics. The findings of the team, led by Bern, have now been published in the highly-regarded journal Physical Review Letters.

Evolution of tree roots may have driven mass extinctions

Scientists collect rock samples on Ymer Island in eastern Greenland, one of several sites whose analysis provided insight into the chemical makeup of lake beds in the Devonian Period.
Photo Credit: John Marshall, University of Southampton

The evolution of tree roots may have triggered a series of mass extinctions that rocked the Earth’s oceans during the Devonian Period over 300 million years ago, according to a study led by scientists at IUPUI, along with colleagues in the United Kingdom.

Evidence for this new view of a remarkably volatile period in Earth’s pre-history is reported in the Geological Society of America Bulletin, one of the oldest and most respected publications in the field of geology. The study was led by Gabriel Filippelli, Chancellor’s Professor of Earth Sciences in the School of Science at IUPUI, and Matthew Smart, a Ph.D. student in his lab at the time of the study.

“Our analysis shows that the evolution of tree roots likely flooded past oceans with excess nutrients, causing massive algae growth,” Filippelli said. “These rapid and destructive algae blooms would have depleted most of the oceans’ oxygen, triggering catastrophic mass extinction events.”

Previously unseen processes reveal path to better rechargeable battery performance

Materials science and engineering postdoctoral researcher Wenxiang Chen is the first author of a new study that applies imaging techniques common in ceramics and metallurgy to rechargeable ion battery research. 
Photo by Fred Zwicky

To design better rechargeable ion batteries, engineers and chemists from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign collaborated to combine a powerful new electron microscopy technique and data mining to visually pinpoint areas of chemical and physical alteration within ion batteries.

A study led by materials science and engineering professors Qian Chen and Jian-Min Zuo is the first to map out altered domains inside rechargeable ion batteries at the nanoscale – a 10-fold or more increase in resolution over current X-ray and optical methods.

The findings are published in the journal Nature Materials.

The team said previous efforts to understand the working and failure mechanisms of battery materials have primarily focused on the chemical effect of recharging cycles, namely the changes in the chemical composition of the battery electrodes.

A new electron microscopy technique, called four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy, allows the team to use a highly focused probe to collect images of the inner workings of batteries.

A mysterious outbreak of bone-eating tb resembled an ancestral form

Tuberculosis is usually encountered as a disease of the lungs, but in 2 percent of cases in the U.S. it can also be found in the bones. The 9,000-year-old skeletons of some Egyptian mummies show signs of having tuberculosis infection in their bones, a painful condition that leaves the bones looking like they’ve been gnawed.

So, it was a weird puzzle when Duke physician Jason Stout M.D. encountered a Wake County TB outbreak in the mid-2000s in which the infection had spread beyond the lungs in six people. “Four out of six were in the bone,” Stout said. “That’s way more than 2 percent.”

The index case, the first person in Raleigh to have this strain of the disease, apparently contracted the bacterium in Vietnam, but he wasn’t feeling very sick and had been working around 400 people in his workplace.

“So, it was prolonged exposure in a workplace,” said Stout, a Duke professor of medicine who tracked down and identified seven subsequent infections through contact tracing and health department records.

All eight people were treated with antibiotics and other co-workers received preventative care and then the strange outbreak went away. But the mystery was never really solved. “I’m an epidemiologist and clinical trial specialist and I was left scratching my head,” Stout said.