Astronomers find missing link for water in the Solar System

This artist’s impression shows the planet-forming disc around the star V883 Orionis. In the outermost part of the disc water is frozen out as ice and therefore can’t be easily detected. An outburst of energy from the star heats the inner disc to a temperature where water is gaseous, enabling astronomers to detect it. 
Illustration Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have detected gaseous water in the planet-forming disc around the star V883 Orionis. This water carries a chemical signature that explains the journey of water from star-forming gas clouds to planets, and supports the idea that water on Earth is even older than our Sun.

“We can now trace the origins of water in our Solar System to before the formation of the Sun,” says John J. Tobin, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, USA and lead author of the study published today in Nature. 

This discovery was made by studying the composition of water in V883 Orionis, a planet-forming disc about 1300 light-years away from Earth. When a cloud of gas and dust collapses it forms a star at its center. Around the star, material from the cloud also forms a disc. Over the course of a few million years, the matter in the disc clumps together to form comets, asteroids, and eventually planets. Tobin and his team used ALMA, in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner, to measure chemical signatures of the water and its path from the star-forming cloud to planets.

Grassroots data is vital for reducing deadly bird-window strikes

FLAP holds an annual event at which all collision casualties from the past year are placed together.
Photo Credit: Nancy Barrett

Citizen science has enabled much of the progress in understanding the scope of bird deaths from building and window collisions, according to a new study, but these grassroots efforts need better funding and more buy-in from government and industry.

These conclusions stem from research by authors at 22 universities, non-governmental organizations, government agencies and conservation organizations. Their study, “Citizen Science to Address the Global Issue of Bird-Window Collisions,” published March 7 in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. As examples, the study highlights the Lights Out Texas program in the United States, the China Anti-Bird Window Collision Action Alliance and the Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP) in Canada. FLAP Canada has been at the forefront of this issue for 25 years and is the template for many of the newer collision prevention efforts.

“During the last five to 10 years there’s been a groundswell of public, conservation and scientific attention to bird-window collisions,” said lead author Scott Loss at Oklahoma State University. “Citizen scientists are leading the way, growing awareness of this major threat to birds, and advocating for bird-friendly buildings and policies. There’s tremendous potential for these projects to do more but they need support, and more conservation organizations need to make collision reduction a key part of their objectives. Conservation funding is always a challenge and perhaps especially so with this often-overlooked global issue.”

Lipid analysis of alcohol-related liver disease offers potential new therapeutic targets

Illustration Credit: youngseok park

Analyses of lipids identified differences between normal liver samples and liver samples from patients with alcohol-related liver disease. The information could be used to find new treatments and for earlier detection of the disease.

Alcohol-related liver disease (ALDs) is prevalent, with one in five people that misuse alcohol found to have exhibited liver fibrosis – damaged and scarred liver tissue and a marker of advanced ALDs such as cirrhosis. Alcohol is a leading cause of cirrhosis with half of worldwide deaths from cirrhosis being caused by alcohol.

ALD is characterized by severe liver damage that causes swelling, weight loss, drowsiness and vomiting blood. The number of people with ALD in the UK has risen in the last few decades as alcohol misuse has increased.

It is widely understood that excessive alcohol consumption affects liver function and the transport of lipids. But researchers and clinicians currently don’t understand the molecular development of alcohol-related liver diseases, particularly its early development.

Deeper insights into bacteria

Image Credit: NCI

RNA sequencing technologies provide valuable insights into how individual cells work. A research team at the University of Würzburg has now developed a technique that provides an even more detailed view.

How do cells work in a normal state? How do they change when they cause disease? Do they react as desired to new drugs? Nowadays, anyone seeking answers to these – and other related – questions in the laboratory can hardly do without a special technique: single-cell RNA sequencing, or "scRNA-seq" for short. This technique provides an accurate picture of gene expression in a single cell at a specific point of time, as well as the associated regulatory networks, allowing conclusions to be drawn about the molecular basis of cell activity.

A research team at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) has now further improved a single-cell RNA sequencing technique it previously developed for use in bacteria. This means that the work in the laboratory is even faster than before and provides much more precise information. The team presents its development in the journal mBio.

Stress memory in plants could hold key to growing disease resistant crops

Scientists at the University of Sheffield have discovered a mechanism behind how plants can acquire long-lasting resistance against attacks from insects
Illustration Credit: Courtesy of The University of Sheffield

A mechanism behind how plants can develop long-term immunity to stress has been discovered by scientists at the University of Sheffield.

Biotic stress experienced by plants can take the form of attacks by insect herbivores or disease-causing pathogens. In crops grown for food production, this stress provides a substantial risk to crop yields and is currently managed with the widespread use of pesticides, which are damaging for the environment and can pose a risk to human health.

Due to the urgent need to find better and more sustainable plant protection methods, Professor Jurriaan Ton, from the University of Sheffield’s Institute for Sustainable Food, and his team, investigated how plants are able to acquire long-lasting immunity against these stressors.

The findings, published in Nature Plants, explain a mechanism of how plants ‘remember’ the stress from a previous attack, and that this long-term memory is encoded in a family of 'junk DNA’ that can prime defense genes for several weeks against further attacks.

Researchers take a step towards turning interactions that normally ruin quantum information into a way of protecting it

Illustration of non-Hermitian topology and open quantum systems.
Illustration Credit: Jose Lado/Aalto University.

A new method for predicting the behavior of quantum devices provides a crucial tool for real-world applications of quantum technology

Researchers have found a way to predict the behavior of many-body quantum systems coupled to their environment. The work represents a way to protect quantum information in quantum devices, which is crucial for real-world applications of quantum technology.

In a study published in Physical Review Letters, researchers at Aalto University in Finland and IAS Tsinghua University in China report a new way to predict how quantum systems, such as groups of particles, behave when they are connected to the external environment. Usually, connecting a system such as a quantum computer to its environment creates decoherence and leaks, which ruin any information about what’s happening inside the system. Now, the researchers have developed a technique which turns that problem into its solution.

The research was carried out by Aalto doctoral researcher Guangze Chen under the supervision of Professor Jose Lado and in collaboration with Fei Song from IAS Tsinghua. Their approach combines techniques from two domains, quantum many-body physics and non-Hermitian quantum physics.

Nanotube sensors are capable of detecting and distinguishing gibberellin plant hormones

The continued study of gibberellins could lead to further breakthroughs in agricultural science and have implications for food security.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of SMART.

Researchers from the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) interdisciplinary research group of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, and their collaborators from Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory have developed the first-ever nanosensor that can detect and distinguish gibberellins (GAs), a class of hormones in plants that are important for growth. The novel nanosensors are nondestructive, unlike conventional collection methods, and have been successfully tested in living plants. Applied in the field for early-stage plant stress monitoring, the sensors could prove transformative for agriculture and plant biotechnology, giving farmers interested in high-tech precision agriculture and crop management a valuable tool to optimize yield.

The researchers designed near-infrared fluorescent carbon nanotube sensors that are capable of detecting and distinguishing two plant hormones, GA3 and GA4. Belonging to a class of plant hormones known as gibberellins, GA3 and GA4 are diterpenoid phytohormones produced by plants that play an important role in modulating diverse processes involved in plant growth and development. GAs are thought to have played a role in the driving forces behind the “green revolution” of the 1960s, which was in turn credited with averting famine and saving the lives of many worldwide. The continued study of gibberellins could lead to further breakthroughs in agricultural science and have implications for food security.

COVID-19 infections raise risk of long-term gastrointestinal problems

Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, has led multiple studies on long COVID-19 as a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care system. His latest findings show that people who have been infected with COVID-19 are at an increased risk of developing a range of gastrointestinal conditions within the first month to a year after illness.
Photo Credit: Matt MIller / School of Medicine / Washington University in St. Louis

People who have had COVID-19 are at increased risk of developing gastrointestinal (GI) disorders within a year after infection compared with people who haven’t been infected, according to an analysis of federal health data by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care system.

Such conditions include liver problems, acute pancreatitis, irritable bowel syndrome, acid reflux and ulcers in the lining of the stomach or upper intestine. The post-COVID-19 GI tract also is associated with an increased likelihood of constipation, diarrhea, abdominal pain, bloating and vomiting.

“Gastrointestinal problems were among the first that were reported by the patient community,” said senior author Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University who has studied extensively the long-term effects of COVID-19 infection. “It is increasingly clear that the GI tract serves as a reservoir for the virus.”

Blood test identifies acute myeloid leukemia patients at greater risk for relapse after bone marrow transplant

Photo Credit: Tatiana

A small portion of adults in remission from a deadly blood cancer had persisting mutations that were detected, which predicted their risk of death from having the cancer return.

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health show the benefits of screening adult patients in remission from acute myeloid leukemia (AML) for residual disease before receiving a bone marrow transplant. The findings, published in JAMA, support ongoing research aimed at developing precision medicine and personalized post-transplant care for these patients.

About 20,000 adults in the United States are diagnosed each year with AML, a deadly blood cancer, and about one in three live past five years. A bone marrow transplant, which replaces unhealthy blood-forming cells with healthy cells from a donor, often improves these chances. However, research has shown that lingering traces of leukemia can make a transplant less effective. 

Researchers in the current study wanted to show that screening patients in remission for evidence of low levels of leukemia using standardized genetic testing could better predict their three-year risks for relapse and survival. To do that, they used ultra-deep DNA sequencing technology to screen blood samples from 1,075 adults in remission from AML. All were preparing to have a bone marrow transplant. The study samples were provided through donations to the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research.

Laser shots at National Ignition Facility could spark additional discoveries in astrophysics

Image of the Crab Nebula, a remnant of a supernova explosion. Scientists are studying the extreme environments in supernovae to understand where the heavy elements came from.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU)

In December, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory made headlines worldwide. Scientists at the NIF performed the first nuclear fusion experiment in which the energy produced from fusion exceeded the amount of energy directly applied to the fuel to ignite it. This first-of-its-kind result will provide invaluable insight into the potential for clean energy from fusion. 

But the NIF’s scientific impact doesn’t end there. Using the Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System (ATLAS), a DOE Office of Science user facility located at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, a team of scientists is studying the extreme, star-like environment created during laser shots at the NIF to better understand its potential as a testbed for nuclear astrophysics research. The work could also provide insight into the nature of stars and the origin of the elements. 

“If we can reproduce these astrophysical conditions on earth in a laboratory, we can study stellar processes in detail in a well-characterized environment close to home.” — ATLAS user Michael Paul, Hebrew University of Jerusalem