Shining a light on germs

Microbe hunters: Empa researchers Paula Bürgisser and Giacomo Reina from the Nanomaterials in Health laboratory in St. Gallen.
Photo Credit: Empa

Light on – bacteria dead. Disinfecting surfaces could be as simple as that. To turn this idea into a weapon against antibiotic-resistant germs, Empa researchers are developing a coating whose germicidal effect can be activated by infrared light. The plastic coating is also skin-friendly and environmentally friendly. A first application is currently being implemented for dentistry.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria and emerging viruses are a rapidly increasing threat to the global healthcare system. Around 5 million deaths each year are linked to antibiotic-resistant germs, and more than 20 million people died during the COVID-19 virus pandemic. Empa researchers are therefore working on new, urgently needed strategies to combat such pathogens. One of the goals is to prevent the spread of resistant pathogens and novel viruses with smart materials and technologies.

Surfaces that come into constant contact with infectious agents, such as door handles in hospitals or equipment and infrastructure in operating theaters, are a particularly suitable area of application for such materials. An interdisciplinary team from three Empa laboratories, together with the Czech Palacký University in Olomouc, has now developed an environmentally friendly and biocompatible metal-free surface coating that reliably kills germs. The highlight: The effect can be reactivated again and again by exposing it to light.

Researchers Uncover a Major Shift in U.S. Landscape: ‘Wild’ Disturbances Are Overtaking Human-directed Changes

Disturbances like hurricanes and fires reshape the landscape and play vital roles in Earth’s systems, therefore, understanding what drives these kinds of disturbances is important for projecting what changes may be ahead.
Photo Credit: Malachi Brooks

If it feels like headlines reporting 100 or 1,000-year floods and mega fires seem more frequent these days, it’s not your imagination.

A project led by researchers from UConn’s Global Environmental Remote Sensing (GERS) Lab has yielded surprising insights into land disturbances and disasters in the United States since the late 1980s, including a shift in what drives those disturbances, and how they are increasing with frightening intensity and frequency. Their findings are published in Nature Geoscience.

The research is the result of a decade-long project to perform a CONterminous United States (CONUS)-wide disturbance agent classification and mapping project, explains GERS Director and Associate Professor in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment in the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources (CAHNR) Zhe Zhu. The ambitious project involved the careful analysis of Landsat satellite data spanning more than 40 years.

Disturbances like hurricanes and fires reshape the landscape and play vital roles in Earth’s systems; therefore, understanding what drives these kinds of disturbances is important for projecting what changes may be ahead.

Cosmic glass found only in Australia reveals ancient asteroid impact

The newly discovered tektites or ‘cosmic glass’.
Photo Credit: Et al. ‘Earth and Planetary Science Letters’

Curtin researchers have helped uncover evidence of a mysterious giant asteroid impact, hidden not in a crater but in tiny pieces of glass found only in Australia.

The discovery centers on rare tektites, which are natural glasses created when a space rock slams into Earth, melting surface material and hurling it hundreds or even thousands of kilometers. The newly discovered type of tektites has so far been found exclusively in an area mainly within South Australia.

Co-author Professor Fred Jourdan, from Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said finding a new tektite field is like opening a fresh chapter in Earth’s violent geological past.

“These glasses are unique to Australia and have recorded an ancient impact event we did not even know about,” Professor Jourdan said.

Methane production may increase as Arctic lakes warm

 

Fältarbete vid sjöar nära Abisko naturvetenskapliga station.
Photo Credit: Sofia Kjellman

A warmer and wetter climate makes lakes more productive – which in turn leads to more methane being released from sediments. A new study involving Umeå University shows that Arctic lakes may contribute even more to the greenhouse effect in the future.

Methane is more than 25 times stronger as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Arctic lakes account for a significant share of global methane emissions, but until now, knowledge about the processes in northern lakes has been limited. An international team of researchers from Norway, Sweden and Spain has now shown that methane production varies greatly between lakes and is closely linked to their characteristics.

The researchers investigated ten lakes on Svalbard and in the subarctic region of Scandinavia, three of them via the Abisko Scientific Research Station. They found that most methane production occurs in the top ten centimeters of lake sediments, where there is abundant organic matter and favorable conditions for microbes.

Sandia team creates X-ray images of the future

Courtney Sovinec examines the multi-patterned target used to create a new type of X-ray image at Sandia National Laboratories.
Photo Credit: Vince Gasparich

When German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays in the late 1800s while experimenting with cathode ray tubes, it was a breakthrough that transformed science and medicine. So much so that the basic concept remains in use today. But a team of researchers at Sandia National Laboratories believes they’ve found a better way, harnessing different metals and the colors of light they emit.

“It’s called colorized hyperspectral X-ray imaging with multi-metal targets, or CHXI MMT for short,” said project lead Edward Jimenez, an optical engineer. Jimenez has been working with materials scientist Noelle Collins and electronics engineer Courtney Sovinec to create X-rays of the future.

“With this new technology, we are essentially going from the old way, which is black and white, to a whole new colored world where we can better identify materials and defects of interest,” Collins said.

The team found they could achieve this using tiny, patterned samples of varied metals such as tungsten, molybdenum, gold, samarium and silver.

Stronger together: a new fusion protein boosts cancer immunotherapy

An immune cell (small, orange) attacking a cancer cell (large, dark red).
Image Credit: M Oeggerli (Micronaut 2019), M P Trefny, and A Zippelius, Translational Oncology, University Hospital Basel, supported by Pathology University Hospital Basel, and Bio-EM Lab, Biozentrum, University of Basel

A newly developed molecule brings together two powerful immunotherapy strategies in one treatment. Researchers at the University of Basel and University Hospital Basel have demonstrated that this fusion protein can both block the “do not attack” signal used by cancer cells and selectively activate tumor-fighting immune cells. This dual action could pave the way for more effective cancer therapies with fewer side effects.

Back in the early 1980s, Linda Taylor, just 33 years old, was diagnosed with advanced skin cancer and faced a grim prognosis. Luckily, she met Dr. Stephen Rosenberg from the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, who treated her with an experimental approach harnessing the body’s own immune system to fight the disease. In 1984, Taylor became the first patient ever to be cured through immunotherapy – a groundbreaking case that forever changed the landscape of cancer treatment.

That pioneering therapy relied on interleukin-2 (IL-2), a signaling molecule that activates many types of immune cells to attack tumors. IL-2 later became the first immunotherapy approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). However, while effective, IL-2 therapy often causes severe side effects and can also stimulate regulatory T cells, which dampen the immune response instead of boosting it.

New Mars research reveals multiple episodes of habitability in Jezero Crater

Jerezo Carter: Mars 2020 Rover Landing Site
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/JHUAPL

New research using NASA’s Perseverance rover has uncovered strong evidence that Mars’ Jezero Crater experienced multiple episodes of fluid activity — each with conditions that could have supported life.

By analyzing high-resolution geochemical data from the rover, scientists have identified two dozen types of minerals, the building blocks of rocks, that help reveal a dynamic history of volcanic rocks that were altered during interactions with liquid water on Mars. The findings, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, provide important clues for the search for ancient life and help guide Perseverance’s ongoing sampling campaign.

The study was led by Rice University graduate student Eleanor Moreland and employed the Mineral Identification by Stoichiometry (MIST) algorithm — a tool developed at Rice — to interpret data from Perseverance’s Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL). PIXL bombards Martian rocks with X-rays to reveal their chemical composition, offering the most detailed geochemical measurements ever collected on another planet, according to the study.

Measuring the quantum W state

Achieving the entanglement measurement of the W state
Image Credit: KyotoU / Takeuchi lab

The concept of quantum entanglement is emblematic of the gap between classical and quantum physics. Referring to a situation in which it is impossible to describe the physics of each photon separately, this key characteristic of quantum mechanics defies the classical expectation that each particle should have a reality of its own, which gravely concerned Einstein. Understanding the potential of this concept is essential for the realization of powerful new quantum technologies.

Developing such technologies will require the ability to freely generate a multi-photon quantum entangled state, and then to efficiently identify what kind of entangled state is present. However, when performing conventional quantum tomography, a method commonly used for state estimation, the number of measurements required grows exponentially with the number of photons, posing a significant data collection problem.

Woodrats’ dietary choices driven by constraints

A woodrat munches on a juniper berry.
Photo Credit: Sara Weinstein/USU

It’s not easy eating green, as most plants have chemical defenses to deter would-be grazers. Getting enough to eat, while minimizing exposure to toxins, is a persistent challenge that shapes an herbivore’s foraging choices. Do they boost their survival by eating a bit of everything, bypass biological booby traps by specializing on one plant or adapt their strategy as environmental conditions change?

The diversity of an animal’s diet—known as dietary niche breadth—is critical to a species’ resilience, yet it remains poorly understood in mammalian herbivores. In a new study, researchers report findings from an eight-year, large-scale survey exploring the dietary choices of a model herbivore, the woodrat (genus: Neotoma). By analyzing plant DNA in the rodents’ droppings, the scientists compared dietary breadth between individuals, within populations and across species of woodrats throughout North America.

Woodrats exhibited a wide spectrum of diet diversity that included both generalists and specialists. Species-level specialists stuck to narrow food niches, with little difference between individual diets. In contrast, generalist populations contained individuals with more varied diets. Even these individuals appeared to forage on a consistent subset of plants, which likely helps them to manage the risks of consuming potentially poisonous food.

Subtle cues between cells and immune system contribute to spread of cancer

Purdue University researcher John Tesmer is deciphering an intricate cell signaling system critical to immune response.
 Photo Credit: Alisha Willett / Purdue University

In the march of metastasis, a molecular trail of crumbs guides some cancer cells from the primary tumor to establish new colonies within the body. Blocking the cells’ ability to follow the trail might halt metastasis but could also meddle with an intricate cellular signaling system critical to immune response. Purdue University scientists are deciphering this signaling system to better understand how it could be used to address multiple diseases, including cancer.

Recent work, published in Nature, focused on a specific transaction inside the cell but is broadly applicable to how cells respond to signals from the endocrine system, a hormonal messaging system that influences metabolism, growth and reproduction and helps the body maintain homeostasis.

“There are multiple pathways inside a cell that are triggered by this messaging system and when they don’t work together properly, it promotes disease,” said research lead John Tesmer, the Walther Distinguished Professor in Cancer Structural Biology in the College of Science and a member of the Purdue Institute for Cancer Research. “Some of these pathways are useful, so ideally, we shouldn’t just turn off the signal at the source. But maybe we can find compounds that elicit a more nuanced response inside the cell, such as by preserving good pathways and dampening those that are bad.”