How to help save plants from extinction

California lilac, a species whose critical limits were obtained for this project
Photo Credit: Karen Udy Chang/Wikimedia Commons

Now is the time to identify the conditions that cause plants to die. Doing so will allow us to better protect plants by choosing conservation targets more strategically, UC Riverside botanists argue in a new paper. 

Published in the Oxford Academic journal Conservation Physiology, the paper demonstrates how scientists can learn the limits past which plants’ vital functions shut down, and makes the case that not doing so is a mistake in this era of increasing drought and wildfires.

“We can measure the amount of water loss plants can tolerate before they start to wilt, and we can learn the temperature at which photosynthesis stops for different kinds of plants,” said Louis Santiago, UCR botany professor and corresponding author of the paper. 

“It is so important to measure the critical limits of when things will fail, and not just how they’re doing now,” he said.

The UCR team believes understanding the current physiological status of a plant species during stress — which so many are experiencing more often with hotter, drier temperatures in many places — can be very useful for showing how close some plants are to local extinction already. Combined with critical limit data, limited conservation funds could be even more wisely spent, revealing plants’ warning signs before they become visible.

Emory-led study finds emerging ‘forever chemicals’ in homes, drinking water and humans

Photo Credit: Pixabay

A newly released study led by researchers from Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health was one of the first to find an emerging class of “forever chemicals” in the homes, drinking water and bodies of United States residents.

There are thousands of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), also known as “forever chemicals,” but scientists and health care experts only have sufficient data on the potential human-health impacts of a relative handful of these man-made chemical compounds. Most of the existing research has focused on the legacy and longer-chain PFAS, such as perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS), which were found to be toxic and have been banned for many years. 

However, an Emory-led study published in Environmental Science & Technology found that an emerging class of ultrashort-” and short-chain PFAS – meant to serve as replacements for the already banned PFAS compounds – are now being found in elevated levels in U.S. residents, as well as their homes and water supplies.  Ultrashort- and short-chain PFAS have fewer carbons and are more mobile, particularly in water, than legacy PFAS.

Scientists and philosophers team up to study concept of evolution beyond biological context

As Earth formed, new geologic processes, especially those related to the interaction of hot fluids with rock during igneous activity and plate tectonics, gave birth to over 1500 new mineral species (4.55 to 2.5 billion years ago). At 2.5 billion years ago, emerging biological life introduced oxygen into the atmosphere. This was a time of pivotal change, when photosynthesis began and the interaction of iron with oxygen-based minerals changed ancient life, providing the blueprint for our future evolution, together with minerals. With the progress of the evolution of life from single-celled to multicelled organisms, and the formation of ecosystems, the mineralogy of the surface of the earth became more complex. The mineral diversity that was created fundamentally changed the direction and possibilities of evolution. Biodiversity leads to mineral diversity, and vice versa. The two systems, biological and mineral, interacted to create life as we know it today
Photo Credit: Dr. Robert Lavinsky

A new paper from an interdisciplinary team led by Carnegie’s Michael Wong and Robert Hazen explores the idea of increasing complexity in natural systems through the lens of evolution. Their work, published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hypothesizes the existence of “a missing law of nature.”

Their work proposes that complex natural systems evolve to states of greater patterning, diversity, and complexity. In other words, they say that evolution is not limited to life on Earth, it also occurs in other massively complex systems, from planets and stars to atoms, minerals, and more.

Authored by a nine-member team—scientists from Carnegie, Caltech, and Cornell University, and philosophers from the University of Colorado—the work was funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

“Macroscopic” laws of nature describe and explain phenomena experienced daily in the natural world. Natural laws related to forces and motion, gravity, electromagnetism, and energy, for example, were described more than 150 years ago.

New Polymer Membranes, AI Predictions Could Dramatically Reduce Energy, Water Use in Oil Refining

A sample of a DUCKY polymer membrane researchers created to perform the initial separation of crude oils using significantly less energy.
Photo Credit: Candler Hobbs

A new kind of polymer membrane created by researchers at Georgia Tech could reshape how refineries process crude oil, dramatically reducing the energy and water required while extracting even more useful materials.

The so-called DUCKY polymers — more on the unusual name in a minute — are reported in Nature Materials. And they’re just the beginning for the team of Georgia Tech chemists, chemical engineers, and materials scientists. They also have created artificial intelligence tools to predict the performance of these kinds of polymer membranes, which could accelerate development of new ones.

The implications are stark: the initial separation of crude oil components is responsible for roughly 1% of energy used across the globe. What’s more, the membrane separation technology the researchers are developing could have several uses, from biofuels and biodegradable plastics to pulp and paper products.

“We’re establishing concepts here that we can then use with different molecules or polymers, but we apply them to crude oil because that’s the most challenging target right now,” said M.G. Finn, professor and James A. Carlos Family Chair in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

High-performance Magnesium-Air Primary Battery with Nitrogen-doped Nanoporous Graphene as Air Electrodes

Magnesium (Mg) is one of the most readily available battery materials. Using brine as the electrolyte with carbon-based cathodes, Mg-air primary batteries can be constructed at a low cost. Researchers at the University of Tsukuba employed nanoporous graphene electrodes and a solid electrolyte to obtain a battery with performance equivalent or even superior to those of platinum electrode-based batteries.
Image Credit:  © Yoshikazu Ito

In pursuit of a carbon-neutral society, advancement of battery technology becomes imperative. Primary batteries, though nonrechargeable, hold promise as power sources for sensors and disaster scenarios because of their cost-effective production and voltage stability. However, most of these batteries employ expensive metal electrodes, such as lithium electrodes, necessitating exploration of alternative electrode materials.

Using carbon-based materials for the cathode, magnesium (Mg) for the anode, oxygen from the atmosphere as the cathode active material, and brine for the electrolyte, Mg-air primary batteries can be constructed using inexpensive and abundant materials. Theoretically, these batteries are expected to match lithium-air batteries with regard to performance. However, they do not perform well in terms of battery capacity and operational stability.

Fluctuating blood pressure: a warning sign for dementia and heart disease

Photo Credit: CDC

A new study by Australian researchers has shown that fluctuating blood pressure can increase the risk of dementia and vascular problems in older people.

Short blood pressure (BP) fluctuations within 24 hours as well as over several days or weeks are linked with impaired cognition, say University of South Australia (UniSA) researchers who led the study.

Higher systolic BP variations (the top number that measures the pressure in arteries when a heart beats) are also linked with stiffening of the arteries, associated with heart disease.

The findings have been published in the journal Cerebral Circulation – Cognition and Behavior.

Lead author Daria Gutteridge, a PhD candidate based in UniSA’s Cognitive Ageing and Impairment Neuroscience Laboratory (CAIN), says it’s well known that high blood pressure is a risk factor for dementia, but little attention is paid to fluctuating blood pressure.

“Clinical treatments focus on hypertension, while ignoring the variability of blood pressure,” Gutteridge says.

Early farmers on the Baltic coast bucked New Stone Age trends and incorporated fish into their diets

Early Neolithic bog pot from Olvig Mose and wooden spoon from Tømmerup in Åmosen, Denmark Photo Credit: Arnold Mikkelsen, The National Museum of Denmark
(CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)

Pioneering early farmers who arrived on the Baltic coast from six thousand years-ago may have taken up fishing after observing indigenous hunter-gatherer communities, a major new study has found.

Previous studies of prehistoric cooking pots in areas including Britain, Spain, France and Portugal have indicated that people completely stopped cooking fish once they started farming crops and animals, even in coastal areas.

In stark contrast, the new research, led by academics at the University of York in collaboration with the British Museum, has found that farmers who arrived on Northern Europe’s Baltic coast adopted a mixed diet which embraced both fish and domesticated animal products. 

The researchers say their study, which looked at fats preserved in fragments from more than a thousand prehistoric vessels uncovered in the coastal area stretching from western Denmark to southern Finland, suggests there may have been close cooperation and interaction between new arrivals and local forager communities.

Scientists discover a key molecular interaction in bacterial pathogens, opening the door for new treatment strategies

A science lab at UNLV.
Photo Credit: Josh Hawkins / University of Nevada, Las Vegas

The legendary Alexander Fleming, who famously discovered penicillin, once said “never to neglect an extraordinary appearance or happening.” And the path of science often leads to just that. New UNLV research is turning the page in our understanding of harmful bacteria and how they turn on certain genes, causing disease in our bodies.

A team of interdisciplinary scientists, led by professor and microbiologist Helen Wing, focuses on Shigella – a lethal bacterial pathogen that causes abdominal cramping, fever, and diarrhea. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that Shigella cases lead to 600,000 deaths globally each year.

Shigella contains a major ‘switch’ protein (VirB), which triggers the bacterium to cause disease in humans. VirB does this by binding to Shigella’s DNA, activating the disease. The researchers showed that it is possible that interfering with VirB’s binding process can prevent Shigella from making us sick.

Ice sheet surface melt is accelerating in Greenland and slowing in Antarctic

Greenland is dotted with frozen meltwater lakes such as the one above, photographed during a NASA expedition in 2012. UCI Earth system scientists led a study into the role of warm, dry, downslope winds in accelerating thawing of the Greenland ice sheet. As part of the same project, the researchers found a contrasting outcome at the other end of the globe: less wind-driven melting in Antarctica.
Photo CXredit: NASA Operation IceBridge

Surface ice in Greenland has been melting at an increasing rate in recent decades, while the trend in Antarctica has moved in the opposite direction, according to researchers at the University of California, Irvine and Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

For a paper published recently in the American Geophysical Union journal Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists studied the role of Foehn and katabatic winds, downslope gusts that bring warm, dry air into contact with the tops of glaciers. They said that melting of the Greenland ice sheet related to these winds has gone up by more than 10 percent in the past 20 years; the impact of the winds on the Antarctic ice sheet has decreased by 32 percent.

“We used regional climate model simulations to study ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, and the results showed that downslope winds are responsible for a significant amount of surface melt of the ice sheets in both regions,” said co-author Charlie Zender, UCI professor of Earth system science. “Surface melt leads to runoff and ice shelf hydrofracture that increase freshwater flow to oceans – causing sea level rise.”

Genomic analysis in snakes shows link between neutral, functional genetic diversity

Eastern massasauga rattlesnake.
Photo Credit: Scott Martin

In the world of threatened and endangered species conservation, the genomic revolution has raised some complicated questions: How can scientists justify assessing species genetic diversity without consulting entire genomes now that they can be sequenced? But then again, how can scientists justify the time and expense of genome sequencing when age-old measures of neutral genetic diversity are much cheaper and easier to obtain?

A new study suggests making a transition from “old school” genetics to “new school” genomics for species conservation purposes probably isn’t necessary in all cases.

Researchers found the functional genetic diversity they detected by analyzing gene variations in fully sequenced genomes of 90 Eastern massasauga rattlesnakes correlated nicely with the neutral genetic diversity seen across broad sections of those same genomes containing no protein-coding genes – similar to the type of genetic material historically used to assess genetic diversity. 

“If we’re worried about the genetic health of populations, neutral diversity can give us a pretty good answer, as has long been argued. We have directly tested that for this species,” said H. Lisle Gibbs, professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University and senior author of the study.