Forensic Study Sheds Light on the Remains of Infants, Children

Photo Credit: Kat Wilcox

A new forensic science study sheds light on how the bones of infants and juveniles decay. The findings will help forensic scientists determine how long a young person’s remains were at a particular location, as well as which bones are best suited for collecting DNA and other tissue samples that can help identify the deceased.

“Crimes against children are truly awful, and all too common,” says Ann Ross, co-author of the study and a professor of biological sciences at North Carolina State University. “It is important to be able to identify their remains and, when possible, understand what happened to them. However, there is not much research on how the bones of infants and children break down over time. Our work here is a significant contribution that will help the medical legal community bring some closure to these young people and, hopefully, a measure of justice.”

For this study, the researchers used the remains of domestic pigs, which are widely used as an analogue for human remains in forensic research. Specifically, the researchers used the remains of 31 pigs, ranging in size from 1.8 kilograms (4 pounds) to 22.7 kilograms (50 pounds). The smaller remains served as surrogates for infant humans, up to one year old. The larger remains served as surrogates for children between the ages of one and nine.

Low-cost device can measure air pollution anywhere

MIT researchers have made an open-source version of the “City Scanner” mobile pollution detector that lets people check air quality anywhere, cheaply. Pictured are some examples of the latest version of the device, called Flatburn, as well as a researcher attaching a prototype to a car.
Image Credits: Courtesy of the researchers. Edited by MIT News
(CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Air pollution is a major public health problem: The World Health Organization has estimated that it leads to over 4 million premature deaths worldwide annually. Still, it is not always extensively measured. But now an MIT research team is rolling out an open-source version of a low-cost, mobile pollution detector that could enable people to track air quality more widely.

The detector, called Flatburn, can be made by 3D printing or by ordering inexpensive parts. The researchers have now tested and calibrated it in relation to existing state-of-the-art machines, and are publicly releasing all the information about it — how to build it, use it, and interpret the data.

“The goal is for community groups or individual citizens anywhere to be able to measure local air pollution, identify its sources, and, ideally, create feedback loops with officials and stakeholders to create cleaner conditions,” says Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab. 

“We’ve been doing several pilots around the world, and we have refined a set of prototypes, with hardware, software, and protocols, to make sure the data we collect are robust from an environmental science point of view,” says Simone Mora, a research scientist at Senseable City Lab and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the scanner’s testing process. The Flatburn device is part of a larger project, known as City Scanner, using mobile devices to better understand urban life.

QUT rock stars solve long-standing diamond conundrum

Professor Balz Kamber and Carl Walsh
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Queensland University of Technology

Two QUT researchers have used a standard laptop computer and a humble piece of rock - from the ‘waste pile’ of a diamond mine - to solve a long-held geological conundrum about how diamonds formed in the deep roots of the earth’s ancient continents.

The paper Deep, ultra-hot-melting residues as cradles of mantle diamond has been published in the prestigious academic journal Nature by lead author QUT PhD student Carl Walsh, along with QUT Professor Balz Kamber and Emma Tomlinson from Trinity College, Ireland.

Mr. Walsh said the study, for his MSc research, involved computer modelling on a rock from the African continent and recovered from the bottom of the lithosphere, the outer part of the Earth between about 30km and 250km below the surface.

Mr. Walsh said the dominant part of a continent was the part that you never see. 

“If you think of an iceberg – the visible part – if you just had an iceberg floating on the ocean surface it would tip over like a boat. This is like the keel of an iceberg,” Mr. Walsh said.

Prenatal cigarette, cannabis exposure may have associations with childhood obesity

Photo Credit: Neal E. Johnson

Childhood obesity rates continue to rise in the United States, putting kids at risk for asthma, sleep apnea, type 2 diabetes, and other health conditions. Children prenatally exposed to both tobacco and cannabis had a 12 times higher risk for obesity by middle childhood (9–12 years of age) compared to non-exposed children, according to recent research, although more research is needed to determine if other factors account for these findings.

Rina Das Eiden, professor of psychology and Social Science Research Institute (SSRI) cofounded faculty member at Penn State, and Kai Ling Kong, associate professor of pediatrics at Children’s Mercy Hospital Kansas City and the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine, began collaborating on the project when they were colleagues at the University of Buffalo, along with co-lead Payanotis Thanos, senior research scientist, and a team of collaborators.

“Two of the most commonly used substances during pregnancy are cigarettes and cannabis, and they are often used together,” said Eiden. “While we know about the risks of prenatal tobacco exposure and child obesity, less is known about co-exposure to tobacco and cannabis. We wanted to examine a potential relationship between prenatal co-exposure and obesity risk from birth to middle childhood.”

Humans are altering the diet of Tasmanian devils, which may accelerate their decline

The researchers investigated the diets of devils from habitats of differing levels of disturbance.
Photo Credit: Ariana Ananda.

New research shows how human-modified landscapes affect the diets of these marsupial scavengers.

The Tasmanian devil roams the island state of Australia as the apex predator of the land, feeding on whatever it pleases as the top dog – or the top devil. But some of these marsupial scavengers could be starting to miss out on a few items from the menu.

According to a study led by UNSW Sydney, living in human-modified landscapes could be narrowing the diet of the Tasmanian devil. The research, published recently in Scientific Reports, suggests devils have access to vastly different cuisines depending on the type of environment they live in.

“We found Tasmanian devil populations had different levels of variation in their diet depending on their habitat,” says Anna Lewis, a PhD candidate at UNSW Science and lead author of the study. “The more that habitat was impacted by humans, the more restrictive the diet became.”

A previous study by the team found most devils are individual specialists, feeding on the same food items consistently over time. But human impacts could be influencing whether they have access to their favorite foods.

“How humans change the environment impacts the animals within them,” says Professor Tracey Rogers, an ecologist at UNSW Science and senior author of the study. “Even small changes can have significant consequences for devils, so we need to be mindful of the consequences of our actions.”

Maintaining heart function in donors declared ‘dead by circulatory criteria’ could improve access to heart transplantation

More donated hearts could be suitable for transplantation if they are kept functioning within the body for a short time following the death of the donor, new research has concluded.
Photo Credit: Wagner

The organs are kept functioning by restarting local circulation to the heart, lungs and abdominal organs – but, crucially, not to the brain – of patients whose hearts have stopped beating for five minutes or longer and have been declared dead by circulatory criteria (donation after circulatory death, or DCD).

It is hoped that this technique could increase the number of usable donated hearts by as much as 30% in the future, helping address the shortage of transplant organs. In 2021, 8,409 heart transplants were reported to the Global Observatory on Donation and Transplantation (GODT) by 54 countries. This activity is in contrast with the 21,935 patients who were on a heart waiting list during the year 2021, of whom 1,511 died while waiting and many others became too sick to receive a transplant.

John Louca, a final year medical student at Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge, and the study’s first author, said: “Heart transplants are the last bastion for patients with end-stage heart failure. They are successful – patients who receive a transplant live on average a further 13 to 16 years. The biggest problem they face is actually getting access to a donated heart: many patients will die before an organ becomes available. That’s why we urgently need to find ways to increase the suitability of donor organs.”

Ural Scientists Design Plastics That Resist Radiation from Technology

Aleksey Korotkov tests the material for electrodynamic properties in an anechoic chamber.
Photo Credit: Rodion Narudinov

The team of scientists from the Institute of Technical Chemistry of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (branch of the Perm Federal Research Centre of UB RAS) and the Ural Federal University created a composite polymer material. The new composite is made from recycled materials and has unique properties. It reflects electromagnetic waves. It is suitable for wireless systems, including radar and satellite communications systems. Such a composite (actually a plastic) can be used to make housing for devices such as smartphones. It will allow them to reduce their electromagnetic radiation. The description of the new material is published in the journal Diamond and Related Materials.

"It is extremely important that we have been able to create a new composite material from virtually recycled raw materials. The basis of the material is chopped carbon fibers, which we extracted from carbon plastics. In addition, the composition of the composite includes magnetite (it is the magnetic nanoparticles) synthesized in our laboratory. Our work can increase the attractiveness of carbon plastics processing due to the use of secondary extracted carbon fibers in the expensive technologies," says Svetlana Astafieva, the co-author of the development, the Head of the Laboratory of Structural-Chemical Modification of Polymers of the Institute of Technical Chemistry of UB RAS.

Bird Flu Associated with Hundreds of Seal Deaths in New England in 2022

A seal may contract the virus if it comes in contact with a sick bird’s excrement or water contaminated by that excrement. Seals and sea birds have environmental contact, if not direct contact, since they share the same water and shoreline.
Photo Credit: Lucía Montenegro

Researchers at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University found that an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) was associated with the deaths of more than 330 New England harbor and gray seals along the North Atlantic coast in June and July 2022, and the outbreak was connected to a wave of avian influenza in birds in the region.

The study was published on March 15 in the journal Emerging Infectious Disease.

HPAI is more commonly known as bird flu, and the H5N1 strain has been responsible for about 60 million poultry deaths in the U.S. since October 2020, with similar numbers in Europe. The virus was known to have spilled over from birds into mammals, such as minks, foxes, skunks, and bears, but those were mostly small, localized events. This study is among the first to directly connect HPAI to a larger scale mortality event in wild mammals.

The co-first authors on the paper—virologist and senior scientist Wendy Puryear and post-doctoral researcher Kaitlin Sawatzki, who both work in the Runstadler Lab at Cummings School—have been researching viruses in seals for years. They credit their findings in the new study to a unique and robust data set made possible by a collaboration with wildlife clinics and rehabilitation and response organizations in the region, in particular with Tufts Wildlife Clinic and director Maureen Murray, V03, associate clinical professor at Cummings School, and an author on the paper.

A new control switch could make RNA therapies easier to program

MIT researchers demonstrated that their RNA sensor could accurately identify cells expressing a mutated version of the p53 gene, which drives cancer development.
Image Credits: iStock, edited by MIT News
(CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Using an RNA sensor, MIT engineers have designed a new way to trigger cells to turn on a synthetic gene. Their approach could make it possible to create targeted therapies for cancer and other diseases, by ensuring that synthetic genes are activated only in specific cells.

The researchers demonstrated that their sensor could accurately identify cells expressing a mutated version of the p53 gene, which drives cancer development, and turn on a gene encoding a fluorescent protein only within those cells. In future work, they plan to develop sensors that would trigger production of cell-killing proteins in cancer cells, while sparing healthy cells.

“There’s growing interest in reducing off-target effects for therapeutics,” says James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Biological Engineering. “With this system, we could target very specific disease cells and tissues, which opens up the possibility of identifying cancer cells and then delivering highly potent therapeutics.”

This approach could also be used to develop treatments for other diseases, including viral or bacterial infections, the researchers say.

Designing More Useful Bacteria

An illustration of viruses called phages infecting a bacterial cell.
Illustration Credit: Behnoush Hajian

In a step forward for genetic engineering and synthetic biology, researchers have modified a strain of Escherichia coli bacteria to be immune to natural viral infections while also minimizing the potential for the bacteria or their modified genes to escape into the wild.

The work promises to reduce the threats of viral contamination when harnessing bacteria to produce medicines such as insulin as well as other useful substances, such as biofuels. Currently, viruses that infect vats of bacteria can halt production, compromise drug safety, and cost millions of dollars.

“We believe we have developed the first technology to design an organism that can’t be infected by any known virus,” said the study’s first author, Akos Nyerges, research fellow in genetics in the lab of George Church in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

“We can’t say it’s fully virus-resistant, but so far, based on extensive laboratory experiments and computational analysis, we haven’t found a virus that can break it,” Nyerges said.

The work also provides the first built-in safety measure that prevents modified genetic material from being incorporated into natural cells, he said.