Exposure to “forever chemicals” during pregnancy linked to increased risk of obesity in kids

Toxic "forever chemicals" are used in oil- and water-repellant textiles, personal care products, firefighting foams, food packaging, medical products and many other household products.
Photo Credit: Stijn Dijkstra

A federally funded study led by researchers at Brown University showed links between prenatal exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances and slightly higher body mass indices in children.

The risks of exposure to “forever chemicals” start even before birth, a new study confirms, potentially setting up children for future health issues.

Exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) during pregnancy was linked to slightly higher body mass indices and an increased risk of obesity in children, according to a new Environmental Health Perspectives study led by Brown University researchers.

While this link has been suggested in previous research, the data has been inconclusive. The new study, which was funded by the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes program at the National Institutes of Health, involves a much broader data set with research sites across the country, said lead author Yun “Jamie” Liu, a postdoctoral research associate in epidemiology at the Brown University School of Public Health.

“The findings were based on eight research cohorts located in different parts of the U.S. as well as with different demographics,” Liu said. “This makes our study findings more generalizable to the population as a whole.”

When it comes to bumblebees, does size matter?

Why bumblebee body sizes vary so significantly is a mystery of bumble biology.
Photo Credit: Myriams-Fotos

While honeybee workers are all the same size, that’s not true for bumblebees. Scientists aren’t sure what’s behind the wide variety in bumble body sizes, but a new UC Riverside project aims to find out.

Certain crops, like greenhouse tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and blueberries, rely on bumblebees for a style of pollination that only bumblebees can perform. Among growers, the preference can be for bigger-bodied bumblebees because they’re thought to be more efficient pollinators. 

Enabled by a $750,000 grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the research team will investigate factors suspected of influencing bumblebee biology and body size, including climate change, wildfires, and the presence of nearby honeybee colonies.

Link between cardiovascular health & disorders such as carpal tunnel

From left to right: Richard Kendall, MD, Matthew Thiese, PhD, Eric Wood, MD, Kurt Hegmann, MD, from the Rocky Mountain Center for Environmental Health.
Photo Credit: Charlie Ehlert

People with higher risks of cardiovascular disease are significantly more likely to develop carpal tunnel syndrome, tennis elbow, golfer’s elbow, and rotator cuff tendinitis, according to a new study involving researchers at the University of Utah and the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health.

The findings of the study, published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, have implications for the prevention and treatment of these common musculoskeletal disorders, which affect tens of millions of Americans each year and result in annual costs of more than $6 billion.

The lead author of the study is Kurt Hegmann, M.D., a University of Utah professor and the director of the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, a partnership between the University of Utah and Weber State University. He said the strength of the associations the researchers discovered between cardiovascular disease risk factors and musculoskeletal disorders is staggering.

“It’s rare that you see 17-fold risks of diseases,” Hegmann said. “These results tell us that prioritizing cardiovascular health is a key to preventing these musculoskeletal disorders, which can have a debilitating impact on people’s quality of life. This is something we and other researchers and medical professionals need to be paying a lot of attention to.”

Nanomaterials: glass printed sintered-free in 3D

The new process can be used to create a wide variety of quartz glass structures on a nanometer scale.
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 Image Credit: Dr. Jens Bauer, KIT

Process developed at KIT manages with relatively low temperatures and enables high resolutions for applications in optics and semiconductor technology - publication in science

Nanometer-fine structures made of quartz glass, which can be printed directly on semiconductor chips, are produced by a process developed at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). A hybrid organic-inorganic polymer resin serves as the starting material for the 3D printing of silicon dioxide. Since the process does not require sintering, the temperatures required for this are significantly lower. At the same time, a higher resolution enables nanophotonics with visible light. The research team reports in the journal Science.

Printing quartz glass consisting of pure silicon dioxide in micro and nanometer-fine structures opens up new possibilities for many applications in optics, photonics and semiconductor technology. So far, however, techniques based on traditional sintering have dominated. The temperatures required for sintering silicon dioxide nanoparticles are above 1,100 degrees Celsius - far too hot for direct separation on semiconductor chips. A research team led by Dr. Jens Bauer from the KIT's Institute for Nanotechnology (INT) has now developed a new process for producing transparent quartz glass with high resolution and excellent mechanical properties at significantly lower temperatures.

Using genomics to unlock the full potential of industrial hemp

Alex Harkess, PhD
Photo Credit: Courtesy of HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology

Plant biologist Alex Harkess, PhD, and his lab at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology are on a mission to change the future of food and fiber crops, one flowering plant species at a time. Much of plant breeding and global food production relies on the pollination of flowers to produce fruits that are eaten and used to produce further progeny. This process might sound straightforward, but it is complicated because some flowers contain only male or female reproductive organs, others contain both (hermaphrodites), and some can even switch sexes. 

How flowers become male, female, or hermaphroditic is a complex phenomenon. Although not completely understood, it is imperative for crop breeding programs looking to create food and fiber crops better adapted to changing environmental pressures. This is especially true in crop species where one plant sex is more valuable than the other, like female hops that produce cones used in the beer industry, male asparagus plants that live longer in fields, and hermaphroditic papaya fruits that taste better than female fruits. 

While the exact mechanism of sex determination is a mystery in many species, it is widely accepted that genetics plays a major role. Dr. Harkess and the members of his lab are experts at using genomics to understand plant reproduction and the genes that control sex in flowers. Sex-determination genes have only been concretely defined in five plant species, with Harkess playing a critical role in their identification in asparagus.  

Prognosis of nasopharyngeal carcinoma

Illustration Credit: Sisi Huang and Yun Du

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is a type of cancer that occurs in the nasopharynx, which is located behind the nose and above the back of the throat. NPC has a geographically skewed distribution worldwide, with high incidence rates in East and Southeast Asia. NPC is difficult to detect early, and treatment usually involves radiation therapy, chemotherapy or a combination of the two.

Recent hospital-based studies suggest that the development of new radiotherapy techniques has contributed to improved NPC prognosis, but little population-based research on NPC patient survival is available. Similarly, little is known about potential environmental prognostic factors for NPC, such as body mass index (BMI) and body shape, pretreatment plasma Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) DNA, and oral microbiome. Therefore, PhD student Yun Du at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics aimed her thesis to characterize population-based NPC survival patterns and identify potential prognostic factors for NPC in southern China.

Neurotic people are more likely to suffer from mood swings

Neurotic people experience negative emotions more intensely and have more mood swings than others.
Photo Credit: Gerd Altmann

In everyday life, our emotions often change from moment to moment, and people experience these fluctuations to varying degrees. Psychologists at Leipzig University have studied the relationship between the personality trait neuroticism – a potential risk factor for mental health – and emotional experiences. They found that neurotic people experience negative emotions not only more intensely, but also with more mood swings than others. They have just published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“Previous studies are in agreement that neurotic people experience stronger negative emotions in everyday life. Because of new, contradictory studies, there has been disagreement about whether this is also associated with increased variability in emotional experiences, i.e. mood swings,” says the study’s first author, Nina Mader from the Wilhelm Wundt Institute of Psychology at Leipzig University. Personality psychologists at Leipzig University have developed a new approach to modelling data that solves previous methodological problems. “We use an approach from Bayesian statistics that allows additional flexibility in data modelling. We first successfully tested this approach in simulations and then re-examined 13 longitudinal data sets. The results suggest that neurotic people do indeed experience greater variability in negative emotions,” explains Mader. A total of 2,518 people were asked about their emotions.

New insights into teen sleep

Dr Serena Bauducco with a sleep monitor at the Flinders University Sleep and Psychology Lab.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Flinders University

Parents setting bedtime rules can be “protective” of their teenage children’s health and wellbeing, helping them to establish good sleep routines as young adults and in the future, say Flinders University researchers.  

Using feedback from 2500 students aged from 12 to 14 between 2019-2020, the national study found adolescents whose parents set bedtimes had at least 20 minutes more sleep on average which can make “all the difference” to next-day performance – including reaching the recommended 8-10 hours of sleep a night.  

The adolescent sleep researchers at Flinders University are now seeking 30 participants for a new study in Adelaide to record their self-monitored sleep overnight, using electronic devices and other factors to find out more about teen sleep habits.  

“Most young people tend to stay up later and have less sleep when they are left to set their own bedtimes, but qualitative research is finding that adolescents are open to parental guidance to improve their sleep patterns,” says psychology researcher Dr Serena Bauducco, a visiting scholar from Sweden.  

Ba2LuAlO5: A New Proton Conductor for Next-Generation Fuel Cells

The discovery of Ba2LuAlO5 as a promising proton conductor paints a bright future for protonic ceramic fuel cells, report scientists from Tokyo Tech. Experiments show that this novel material has a remarkably high proton conductivity even without any additional chemical modifications, and molecular dynamics simulations reveal the underlying reasons. These new insights may pave the way to safer and more efficient energy technologies.

When talking about sustainability, the ways in which a society generates energy are some of the most important factors of consideration. Eager to eventually replace traditional energy sources such as coal and oil, scientists across the world are trying to develop environmentally friendly technologies that produce energy safely and more efficiently. Among them, fuel cells have been steadily gaining traction since the 1960s as a promising approach to producing electricity directly from electrochemical reactions.

However, typical fuel cells based on solid oxides have a notable drawback in that they operate at high temperatures, usually over 700 °C. That is why many scientists have focused on protonic ceramic fuel cells (PCFCs) instead. These cells use special ceramics that conduct protons (H+) instead of oxide anions (O2−). Thanks to a much lower operating temperature in the range of 300 to 600 °C, PCFCs can ensure a stable energy supply at a lower cost, compared to most other fuel cells. Unfortunately, only a few proton-conducting materials with reasonable performance are currently known, which is slowing down progress in this field.

Coral disease tripled in the last 25 years. Three-quarters will likely be diseased by next century

Warming ocean temperatures are linked to an increase in coral disease prevalence.
Photo Credit: Lisa

Research suggests warming temperatures will see nearly 80 per cent of coral in reefs diseased in the next 80 years.

Deadly coral disease is spreading as global temperatures warm, and it’s likely to become endemic to reefs the world over by the next century, according to new research.

The study, published today in Ecology Letters, shows the extent coral health will suffer from climate change, which threatens to wipe out entire reef habitats and devastate coastal communities.

For the meta-analysis, researchers from UNSW Sydney analyzed 108 studies of coral health where coral reefs were surveyed for disease symptoms. They then linked the disease surveys to ocean sea surface temperature records to understand how climate change – specifically ocean warming – has influenced coral disease prevalence worldwide and performed modelling to forecast disease under future warming scenarios.

They found coral disease increased with ocean temperatures over time, tripling over the past 25 years to 9.92 per cent globally. Their modelling also predicts disease prevalence can increase to 76.8 per cent in 2100 if temperatures continue to rise on the same trajectory – the most conservative worst-case scenario.