Motile Sperm and Frequent Abortions in Spreading Earth moss

The protein PINC has an influence on the motility of sperm cells (left) and the anchoring of spore capsules (right, dark structures) in the moss Physcomitrella. The fluorescence microscope images in the middle show the male sex organ on the left and a young spore capsule on the right. PINC is marked in magenta.
Image Credit: Volker Lüth / University of Freiburg

Freiburg researchers discover that sperm motility and anchoring of the spore capsule in the spreading earth moss Physcomitrella are influenced by the auxin transporter PINC.

As a component of moors, mosses are important for climate conservation. They are also gaining increasing significance in biotechnology and the manufacture of biopharmaceuticals. For the most varied of rationales, mosses are interesting research objects. One reason for this is because they are particularly similar to the first land plants. As a result, they provide insight into the original function of signaling molecules which regulate growth and development in all land plants today. Researchers at the University of Freiburg and the Excellence Cluster CIBSS – Centre for Integrative Biological Signaling Studies – have discovered that transporters of the hormone auxin influence the fertility of spreading earth moss. Their observations have been published in the scientific journal New Phytologist.

MLU physicists solve mystery of two-dimensional quasicrystal formation from metal oxides

A substructure consisting of rings of different sizes embeds itself seamlessly into a hexagonal structure
 Photo Credit: Dr. Stefan Förster

The structure of two-dimensional titanium oxide breaks up at high temperatures by adding barium; instead of regular hexagons, rings of four, seven and ten atoms are created that order periodically. A team at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) made this discovery in collaboration with researchers from the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Microstructure Physics, the Université Grenoble Alpes and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (Gaithersburg, USA), thereby solving the riddle of two-dimensional quasicrystal formation from metal oxides. Their findings have been published in the renowned journal "Nature Communications".

Hexagons are frequently found in nature. The best-known example is honeycomb, but graphene or various metal oxides, such as titanium oxide, also form this structure. "Hexagons are an ideal pattern for periodic arrangements," explains Dr Stefan Förster, researcher in the Surface and Interface Physics group at MLU’s Institute of Physics. "They fit together so perfectly that there are no gaps." In 2013, this group made an astonishing discovery upon depositing an ultrathin layer containing titanium oxide and barium on a platinum substrate and heating it to around 1,000 degrees centigrade in an ultra-high vacuum. The atoms arranged themselves into triangles, squares and rhombuses that group in even larger symmetrical shapes with twelve edges. A structure with 12-fold rotational symmetry was created, instead of the expected 6-fold periodicity. According to Förster, "Quasicrystals were created that have an aperiodic structure. This structure is made of basic atomic clusters that are highly ordered, even if the systematics behind this ordering is difficult for the observer to discern." The physicists from Halle were the first worldwide to demonstrate the formation of two-dimensional quasicrystals in metal oxides. 

Humans have influenced the growth of blue-green algae in lakes for thousands of years

TERENO Monitoring Station on Lake Tiefer See, Germany (weather station, water probes, sediment traps).
Photo Credit: A. Brauer

In recent years, there have been increasing reports of toxic blue-green algae blooms in summer, even in German lakes, caused by climate warming and increased nutrient inputs. But humans have not only had an influence on the development of blue-green algae since modern times, but already since the Bronze Age from about 2,000 B.C. This is the result of a study by researchers from the German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ and colleagues, published in the scientific journal “Communications Biology”. Since some blue-green algae, also known as cyanobacteria, leave no visible fossil traces in sediments due to their small size, little is known about how they evolved in our lakes during the last centuries and millennia. Using DNA from sediments, the researchers have now been able to decipher for the first time the history of blue-green algae over the last 11,000 years in the sediments of a lake in Mecklenburg.

Artificial photosynthesis uses sunlight to make biodegradable plastic

Fumaric acid synthesis from CO2 using solar energy. Using sunlight to power the photoredox system pyruvic acid and CO2 are converted into fumaric acid, by malate dehydrogenase and fumarase.
Illustration Credit: Yutaka Amao, Osaka Metropolitan University

In recent years, environmental problems caused by global warming have become more apparent due to greenhouse gases such as CO2. In natural photosynthesis, CO2 is not reduced directly, but is bound to organic compounds which are converted to glucose or starch. Mimicking this, artificial photosynthesis could reduce CO2 by combining it into organic compounds to be used as raw materials, which can be converted into durable forms such as plastic.

A research team led by Professor Yutaka Amao from the Research Center for Artificial Photosynthesis and graduate student Mika Takeuchi, from the Osaka Metropolitan University Graduate School of Science, have succeeded in synthesizing fumaric acid from CO2, a raw material for plastics, powered—for the first time—by sunlight. Their findings were published in Sustainable Energy & Fuels.

Probe can measure both cell stiffness and traction, researchers report

Professor Ning Wang, front right, is joined by researchers, from left, Fazlur Rashid, Kshitij Amar and Parth Bhala.
Photo Credit: Fred Zwicky

Scientists have developed a tiny mechanical probe that can measure the inherent stiffness of cells and tissues as well as the internal forces the cells generate and exert on one another. Their new “magnetic microrobot” is the first such probe to be able to quantify both properties, the researchers report, and will aid in understanding cellular processes associated with development and disease.

They detail their findings in the journal Science Robotics.

“Living cells generate forces through protein interactions, and it’s very hard to measure these forces,” said Ning Wang, a professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who led the research. “Most probes can either measure the forces actively generated by the tissues and cells themselves, a trait we call traction, or they can measure their stiffness – but not both.”

To measure cell stiffness, researchers need a relatively rigid probe that can compress, stretch or twist the tissues and quantify how robustly they resist. But to measure the cells’ own internally generated contractions or expansions, a probe must be relatively soft and supple.

Like other scientists, Wang and his colleagues had already developed probes to measure each of these qualities individually. But he said he wanted to develop a more universal probe that could tackle both at once. Such a probe would allow a better understanding of how these properties influence diseases like arteriosclerosis or cancer, or how an embryo develops, for example.

Risk of developing heart failure much higher in rural areas vs. urban

Photo Credit: Tumisu

Large NIH-supported study showed that rural-dwelling Black men are at greatest risk.

Adults living in rural areas of the United States have a 19% higher risk of developing heart failure compared to their urban counterparts, and Black men living in rural areas have an especially higher risk – 34%, according to a large observational study supported by the National Institutes of Health.

The study, one of the first to look at the link between living in rural America and first-time cases of heart failure, underscores the importance of developing more customized approaches to heart failure prevention among rural residents, particularly Black men. The study was largely funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of NIH, and the findings, produced in collaboration with Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, published today in JAMA Cardiology.

“We did not expect to find a difference of this magnitude in heart failure among rural communities compared to urban communities, especially among rural-dwelling Black men,” said Véronique L. Roger, M.D., M.P.H., the study’s corresponding author and a senior investigator with the Epidemiology and Community Health Branch in NHLBI’s Division of Intramural Research. “This study makes it clear that we need tools or interventions specifically designed to prevent heart failure in rural populations, particularly among Black men living in these areas.”

What crocodile DNA reveals about the Ice Age

McGill University postdoctoral fellow José Avila-Cervantes with an American Crocodile (Crocodylus acutus).
Photo Credit: Hans Larsson

What drives crocodile evolution? Is climate a major factor or changes in sea levels? Determined to find answers to these questions, researchers from McGill University discovered that while changing temperatures and rainfall had little impact on the crocodiles’ gene flow over the past three million years, changes to sea levels during the Ice Age had a different effect.

“The American crocodile tolerates huge variations in temperature and rainfall. But about 20,000 years ago – when much of the world's water was frozen, forming the vast ice sheets of the last glacial maximum – sea levels dropped by more than 100 meters. This created a geographical barrier that separated the gene flow of crocodiles in Panama,” says postdoctoral fellow José Avila-Cervantes, working under the supervision of McGill professor Hans Larsson.

Thermal motions and oscillation modes determine the uptake of bacteria in cells

Photo of a membrane bubble with different oscillation modes in the background and experimental scheme in the foreground. Optical tweezers (laser focus in red) bring a thermally fluctuating particle into contact with a membrane bubble (green) until the particle is invaginated into the membrane and taken up.
Graphic Credit: AG Rohrbach

How and with what effort does a bacterium - or a virus - enter a cell and cause an infection? Researchers from Freiburg have now made an important contribution to answering this question: A team led by physicist Prof. Dr. Alexander Rohrbach and his collaborator Dr. Yareni Ayala was able to show how thermal fluctuations of a model bacterium and membrane oscillation modes of a model cell influence the energy with which the model bacteria dock and enter the membrane. The results have just been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Like a sticky piece of candy on a wobbly balloon

“To understand how a bacterium or virus enters a cell, you can imagine a sticky candy on a floppy, wobbly balloon. When a child shakes the rubber balloon around, the candy sticks even tighter to its surface,” said Rohrbach, a professor of -Bio- and Nano-Photonics at the Department of Microsystems Engineering at the University of Freiburg. In his lab, the laser and bio-physicists set up a similar experiment to study the physics of infection processes. The wobbly balloon corresponds to a giant uni-lamellar vesicle (GUV), which serves as a biological model cell. The membrane vesicle is the size of a tiny grain of sand about 20 micrometers in diameter.

COVID-19 conspiracy theories that spread fastest focused on evil, secrecy

Covid 19 Conspiracy Initiated
Image Credit: Dr StClaire

In the early pandemic, conspiracy theories that were shared the most on Twitter highlighted malicious purposes and secretive actions of supposed bad actors behind the crisis, according to an analysis of nearly 400,000 posts. 

In the study, researchers identified commonalities in five of the most popular conspiracy theories: those related to Bill Gates, 5G Networks, vaccinations, QAnon and Agenda 21.

While each theory appears to have a different subject, the social media narratives often overlapped, said Porismita Borah, associate professor in Washington State University’s Murrow College of Communications.

“The conspiracy theories might be using different strategies, but the narratives are often connected,” said Borah, the corresponding author on the study published in the journal New Media and Society. “These theories have a lot in common in that they try to make the stories part of a bigger conspiracy so that if people believe in one conspiracy, then they tend to believe in the other.”

Spinning food processing waste into ‘gold’

Among the waste types analyzed in the study was fried donut waste, a potential candidate for anaerobic fermentation to biogas.
Photo Credit: Pexels

There is money to be made – and potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – by finding a second life for the potato peels, fried dough particles, cheese whey and other industrial food-processing waste products that routinely end up in landfills, according to new research.

Scientists have taken the first step at estimating the best large-scale uses for food processing waste, first analyzing its contents and, based on those findings, proposing production opportunities ranging from sustainable fuels, biogas and electricity to useful chemicals and organic fertilizer.

This work is known as valorization, or determining the potential value of something “that is otherwise valueless or even a drain on resources for a company – when you have to spend money to get rid of it,” said Katrina Cornish, senior author of the study and professor of horticulture and crop science and food, agricultural and biological engineering at The Ohio State University. 

“The bioeconomy is becoming much more prevalent as a topic of conversation. In this case, don’t get rid of food waste – make some money from it,” said Cornish, also an Ohio Research Scholar of Bio-Emergent Materials. “Here, we’re putting the base model in place for food manufacturers who are wondering, ‘What can I do with this stuff?’ Our flow chart guides them in a specific direction and prevents them from wasting time trying something we know won’t work.” 

Wolves eliminate deer on Alaskan Island then quickly shift to eating sea otters

Wolves on an Alaskan island caused a deer population to plummet and switched to primarily eating sea otters in just a few years, a finding scientists at Oregon State University and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game believe is the first case of sea otters becoming the primary food source for a land-based predator.

Using methods such as tracking the wolves with GPS collars and analyzing their scat, the researchers found that in 2015 deer were the primary food of the wolves, representing 75% of their diet, while sea otters comprised 25%. By 2017, wolves transitioned to primarily consuming sea otters (57% of their diet) while the frequency of deer declined to 7%. That pattern held through 2020, the end of the study period.

“Sea otters are this famous predator in the near-shore ecosystem and wolves are one of the most famous apex predators in terrestrial systems,” said Taal Levi, an associate professor at Oregon State. “So, it’s pretty surprising that sea otters have become the most important resource feeding wolves. You have top predators feeding on a top predator.”

No link between IVF-assisted conception and school-age childhood development outcomes

Researchers say the study offers important reassurance for clinicians and families.
Photo Credit: Yan Krukau

A comprehensive study of more than 400,000 children - with over 11,000 conceived via in-vitro fertilization (IVF) - has found no link between IVF conception and adverse developmental outcomes for school-age children.

Published today in PLOS Medicine, the study involved collaboration between the three major IVF units in Victoria - Melbourne IVF, Monash IVF and City Fertility Centre, and incorporated data on over 400,000 children born between 2005 and 2013, 11,059 of whom were conceived via IVF.

Led by Dr Amber Kennedy and Dr Anthea Lindquist, the study assessed childhood developmental and educational outcomes using the Australian Early Development Census (AEDC) and the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN).

Dr Kennedy said: “We found no difference in performance across the five domains of the AEDC, nor in NAPLAN scores, between children who were born after IVF-assisted conception and those who were conceived without assistance.

Fish sensory organ key to improving navigational skills of underwater robots

Yellow blaze African cichlid
Photo Credit: Sarah Page

Scientists, led by the University of Bristol, have been studying a fish sensory organ to understand cues for collective behavior which could be employed on underwater robots.

This work was centered around the lateral line sensing organ in African cichlid fish, but found in almost all fish species, that enables them to sense and interpret water pressures around them with enough acuity to detect external influences such as neighboring fish, changes in water flow, predators and obstacles.

The lateral line system as a whole is distributed over the head, trunk and tail of the fish. It is comprised of mechanoreceptors (neuromasts) that are either within subdermal channels or on the surface of the skin.

Lead author Elliott Scott of the University of Bristol’s Department of Engineering Mathematics explained: “We were attempting to find out if the different areas of the lateral line - the lateral line on the head versus the lateral line on the body, or the different types of lateral line sensory units such as those on the skin, versus those under it, play different roles in how the fish is able to sense its environment through environmental pressure readings.

Interfering in big decisions friends and family take could violate a crucial moral right, philosopher argues

Two people speaking, sat at a table 
Photo Credit: Charles Deluvio

If you’ve told an adult friend or family member that they should not take a job, not date someone, not try skydiving or not move abroad, you may have violated a crucial moral right to ‘revelatory autonomy’ and ‘self-authorship’, according to a philosopher at Christ’s College, Cambridge.

Dr Farbod Akhlaghi’s study, published in the journal Analysis, is the first of its kind to suggest that we have a moral right to ‘revelatory autonomy’, that is the right to discover for ourselves who we’ll become as a result of making ‘transformative choices’, choices to have experiences that teach us what that experience will be like for us whilst also changing our core preferences, values and desires.

Dr Akhlaghi says: “The ability to see that the person we’ve become is the product of decisions that we made for ourselves is very important.

“I’m not telling people what to do. I’m just highlighting part of what is morally at stake in these very common interactions and trying to develop a framework for us to understand them. I hope some may find this helpful, as these will always be difficult moments for all of us.”

Global study of hypoxia in rivers shows it is more prevalent than previously thought

High-frequency sensors deployed in streams, such as those being installed by Joanna Blaszczak in a stream in Montana, can provide continuous data that captures night-time hypoxic conditions.
Photo Credit: Malgosia Blaszczak.

New research led by University of Nevada, Reno Assistant Professor Joanna Blaszczak shows hypoxia in rivers and streams is generally much more prevalent across the globe than previously thought. Hypoxia is low or depleted oxygen levels in surface waters that can be harmful to aquatic species and can in some cases increase production of harmful greenhouse gases from rivers.

The research, published recently in the journal Limnology and Oceanography Letters, compiles over 118 million readings of dissolved oxygen and temperature taken from over 125,000 locations in rivers across six continents and 93 countries and spanning over 100 years, from 1900 to 2018. Hypoxia, defined in this study as dissolved oxygen concentrations below 2 milligrams per liter, was detected in rivers and streams in 53 countries, with 12.6% of all locations exhibiting at least one hypoxic measurement.

“Hypoxia in coastal waters and lakes is widely recognized as a detrimental environmental issue, yet we have lacked a comparable understanding of hypoxia in rivers,” Blaszczak, with the University’s College of Agriculture, Biotechnology & Natural Resources, said. “While 12.6% might not seem like a huge percentage, previously it was generally thought that occurrences of hypoxia in rivers and streams were exceedingly rare. Having shown presence of hypoxia in one of every eight river locations with data is definitely a game changer in terms of how we need to think of and give attention to the issue of hypoxia in rivers and streams.”