How does a millipede get its legs?

These microscopic images of the outside and inside of a millipede show the unexpected transparent protrusions, containing bundles of legs, present before the millipede molts. After the molt, while the millipede recovers, the legs are fully formed and become functional.
Photo Credit: © 2023 Soma Chiyoda

Millipede legs grow in an unexpected way, according to new research. Previously, it was thought that when a millipede molts (sheds its exoskeleton), it grows new segments on the end of its body without legs. Then after the next molt, the previously new segments re-emerge with fully formed legs attached. However, a team at the University of Tokyo has found that new segments actually contain tiny bundles of legs, which appear as transparent protrusions before molting and then become fully formed afterwards. This discovery could help us understand how not only millipedes, but also other arthropods (invertebrates with jointed legs) grow.

If you’ve recently been for a picnic in the park, you’ll probably have had to contend with a few creepy-crawlies. One that you might come across trundling under a shady tree is the harmless millipede. Famous for its multitude of legs (though the first to have more than 1,000 was actually only discovered in 2021), it is thought to have been one of the first creatures to walk on land and breathe air about 420 million years ago. Their lifestyle of burrowing in the dirt and digesting decomposing plant matter means that they play a very important role in our ecosystems, but there is still a lot we don’t know about them, including exactly how they get all those famous legs.

Immediate carbon cuts, common marine heatwave terminology urged

Photo Credit: Patrick Hendry

Over the past 200 years, the ocean and atmosphere have been accumulating massive amounts of carbon dioxide as factories, automobiles, airplanes and more churn out the powerful greenhouse gas. Two articles published in Nature by University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa oceanographers provide a reality check on the limitations of carbon dioxide removal and a warning­ that marine heatwaves need clear definitions so communities can adapt.

Limitations of carbon dioxide removal

In all the scenarios assessed by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, nations around the world must dramatically and rapidly reduce their dependence on fossil fuels in order to limit global warming to 1.5–2 °C above pre-industrial levels. Further, the paths to limit warming also require the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, using methods that are still in the early stages of development.

David Ho, oceanography professor at the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), wrote in his Nature article, “We must stop talking about deploying [carbon dioxide removal] as a solution today, when emissions remain high—as if it somehow replaces radical, immediate emission cuts. We have to shift the narrative as a matter of urgency.”

Chemists Have Developed a Guide to Oxygen Electrode Design Strategies

Structure of perovskite materials for solid oxide electrochemical devices.
Illustration Credit: Et al., Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments

The group of scientists created a guide to oxygen electrode design strategies for solid oxide electrochemical devices. The researchers formulated key directions for the chemical and structural design of oxygen electrodes for solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC) and solid oxide electrolysis cells (SOEC). The scientists published their work on current strategies for improving the electrochemical performance of oxygen electrodes at reduced operating temperatures in the journal Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments.

According to the authors of the study, the guide will be useful to scientists whose work is related to the development and design of air electrodes for electrochemical cells.

"Many of the processes in hydrogen energy technology are implemented using fuel cells and electrolysis, in which SOFCs and SOECs are involved. These electrochemical devices are very promising due to their high energy conversion efficiency and wide range of operating characteristics," explains Dmitry Medvedev, Head of the Scientific Laboratory of Hydrogen Energy at UrFU.

Breakthrough fix identified for earthquake-prone buildings

A cost-effective solution to strengthen Aotearoa New Zealand's riskiest buildings has been identified by researchers at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland.

PhD candidate Victor Li, Dr Enrique del Rey Castillo and Dr Rick Henry from the Faculty of Engineering found that wrapping weak spots in concrete walls with carbon-fiber strips can strengthen high-rise buildings to resist earthquakes well beyond the demands of the building code.

The research was funded by Toka Tū Ake EQC to help find the most efficient and cost-effective ways to strengthen thin concrete walls.

The findings are likely to draw significant interest in the engineering sector as over 100 multi-story buildings in Wellington’s CBD alone are well below modern code.

Li says that thin concrete walls can deform out of plane due to their inherent instability, and just one percent of lateral displacement can cause catastrophic collapse.

Even as temperatures rise, this hydrogel material keeps absorbing moisture

MIT engineers have found that a common hydrogel has unique, super-soaking abilities. Even as temperatures climb, the transparent material continues to absorb moisture, and could serve to harvest water in desert regions, and passively regulate humidity in tropical climates.
Photo Credit: Felice Frankel

The vast majority of absorbent materials will lose their ability to retain water as temperatures rise. This is why our skin starts to sweat and why plants dry out in the heat. Even materials that are designed to soak up moisture, such as the silica gel packs in consumer packaging, will lose their sponge-like properties as their environment heats up.

But one material appears to uniquely resist heat’s drying effects. MIT engineers have now found that polyethylene glycol (PEG) — a hydrogel commonly used in cosmetic creams, industrial coatings, and pharmaceutical capsules — can absorb moisture from the atmosphere even as temperatures climb.

The material doubles its water absorption as temperatures climb from 25 to 50 degrees Celsius (77 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit), the team reports.

PEG’s resilience stems from a heat-triggering transformation. As its surroundings heat up, the hydrogel’s microstructure morphs from a crystal to a less organized “amorphous” phase, which enhances the material’s ability to capture water.

Teasing strange matter from the ordinary

New insights from Jefferson Lab reveal details of how strange matter forms in ordinary matter
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Jefferson Lab

In a unique analysis of experimental data, nuclear physicists have made the first-ever observations of how lambda particles, so-called “strange matter,” are produced by a specific process called semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering (SIDIS). What’s more, these data hint that the building blocks of protons, quarks and gluons, are capable of marching through the atomic nucleus in pairs called diquarks, at least part of the time. These results come from an experiment conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.

It’s a result that has been decades in the making. The dataset was originally collected in 2004. Lamiaa El Fassi, now an associate professor of physics at Mississippi State University and principal investigator of the work, first analyzed these data during her thesis project to earn her graduate degree on a different topic.

Nearly a decade after completing her initial research with these data, El Fassi revisited the dataset and led her group through a careful analysis to yield these unprecedented measurements. The dataset comes from experiments in Jefferson Lab’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF), a DOE user facility. In the experiment, nuclear physicists tracked what happened when electrons from CEBAF scatter off the target nucleus and probe the confined quarks inside protons and neutrons. The results were recently published in Physical Review Letters.

Durable, low-cost COVID-19 vaccine could help fill in gaps around the world

A protein-based COVID-19 vaccine developed by researchers at Stanford Medicine and their colleagues may be ideal for infants.
Image Credit: Gerd Altmann

In a study led by Stanford Medicine researchers, a low-cost COVID-19 vaccine that does not require refrigeration provided immunity in rhesus monkeys for one year.

A low-cost, protein-based COVID-19 vaccine tested in rhesus monkeys by Stanford Medicine researchers and colleagues offered immunity against known variants for at least one year. Researchers hope the vaccine, which can remain unrefrigerated for up to two weeks and may be especially beneficial for infants, will help alleviate the need for boosters while improving herd immunity around the world.

If the vaccine succeeds in human trials, it could be an alternative to the mRNA vaccines widely used for COVID-19, without drawbacks such as high expense and low-temperature storage requirements. Protein-based vaccines, which use protein fragments of the target virus rather than the whole virus, have been used for decades to protect against diseases such as shingles and hepatitis.

“Our motivation was to come up with a vaccine that would provide worldwide access to vaccination,” said Peter Kim, PhD, the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor in Biochemistry. “In the case of the mRNA vaccines, for example, they are expensive, difficult to make and require storage in freezers. So, we wanted to solve those problems with this vaccine.”

Study shows how machine learning can identify social grooming behavior from acceleration signals in wild baboons

Photo Credit: Charl Durand

Scientists from Swansea University and the University of Cape Town have tracked social grooming behavior in wild baboons using collar-mounted accelerometers.

The study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, is the first to successfully calculate grooming budgets using this method, which opens a whole avenue of future research directions.

Using collars containing accelerometers built at Swansea University, the team recorded the activities of baboons in Cape Town, South Africa, identifying and quantifying general activities such as resting, walking, foraging and running, and also the giving and receiving of grooming.

A supervised machine learning algorithm was trained on acceleration data matched to baboon video recordings and successfully recognized the giving and receiving grooming with high overall accuracy.

The team then applied their machine learning model to acceleration data collected from 12 baboons to quantify grooming and other behaviors continuously throughout the day and night-time.

Researchers develop carbon-negative concrete

Graduate student Zhipeng Li and Professor Xianming Shi.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Washington State University

A viable formula for a carbon-negative, environmentally friendly concrete that is nearly as strong as regular concrete has been developed at Washington State University.  

In a proof-of-concept work, the researchers infused regular cement with environmentally friendly biochar, a type of charcoal made from organic waste, that had been strengthened beforehand with concrete wastewater. The biochar was able to suck up to 23% of its weight in carbon dioxide from the air while still reaching a strength comparable to ordinary cement.   

The research could significantly reduce carbon emissions of the concrete industry, which is one of the most energy- and carbon-intensive of all manufacturing industries. The work, led by doctoral student Zhipeng Li, is reported in the journal Materials Letters.

“We’re very excited that this will contribute to the mission of zero-carbon built environment,” said Xianming Shi, professor in the WSU Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the corresponding author on the paper.

The quantum spin liquid that isn't one

Prof. Andrej Pustogow
Photo Credit: Courtesy of TU Wien

The simplest explanation is often the best - this also applies to fundamental science. Researchers from TU Wien and Toho University recently showed that a supposed quantum spin liquid can be described by more conventional physics.

For two decades, it was believed that a possible quantum spin liquid was discovered in a synthetically produced material. In this case, it would not follow the laws of classical physics even on a macroscopic level, but rather those of the quantum world. There is great hope in these materials: they would be suitable for applications in quantum entangled information transmission (quantum cryptography) or even quantum computation.

Now, however, researchers from TU Wien and Toho University in Japan have shown that the promising material, κ-(BEDT-TTF)2Cu2(CN)3, is not the predicted quantum spin liquid, but a material that can be described using known concepts.

In their recent publication in the journal "Nature Communications", the researchers report how they investigated the mysterious quantum state by measuring the electrical resistance in κ-(BEDT-TTF)2Cu2(CN)3 as a function of temperature and pressure. In 2021, Andrej Pustogow from the Institute of Solid-State Physics at TU Wien has already investigated the magnetic properties of this material, opens an external URL in a new window.