World’s fastest burst-mode X-ray camera hits the road

Sandia National Laboratories’ Quinn Looker inspects sensors used in the ultrafast X-ray imaging camera.
Photo Credit: Craig Fritz

Nuclear reactions are fast. Really fast. Faster than billionths of a second. Your best shot at catching one is with a high-speed X-ray camera that can only be obtained from the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories. But these cameras could soon become more widely available.

Sandia has partnered with Albuquerque-based startup Advanced hCMOS Systems (pronounced “H C moss”) to commercialize ultrafast imaging technology invented at the Labs and used extensively in fusion research. If successful, the collaboration could move the world more quickly to limitless clean energy by accelerating such research, while potentially impacting many other research and development areas.

“A perfect example is glass research,” said Liam Claus, cofounder of Advanced hCMOS Systems. “The Gorilla Glass that’s in your iPhone so it doesn’t shatter every time it slips out of your hand — there’s a ton of materials science that’s gone into that. They need to understand how it fractures, and glass fractures can propagate at extremely high speeds.”

Rice labs seek RNA programming for ‘smart’ antibiotics

Rice University bioscientists James Chappell (left) and Joff Silberg aim to create “genetically encoded antibiotics,” strands of RNA that bacteria will readily copy and share. The RNA will selectively kill disease-causing bacteria thanks to a triggering mechanism that will be activated by “virulence genes” or other biomarkers found only in bacterial pathogens.
Photo Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University

Synthetic biologists at Rice University are embarking on a three-year project to create “genetically encoded antibiotics,” strands of RNA that bacteria will readily copy and share that will selectively kill only disease-causing, pathogenic bacteria.

“Most bacteria pose no danger to human health,” said James Chappell, an assistant professor of biosciences and bioengineering at Rice. “The question for us as synthetic biologists is, ‘Can we create genetic programs that move through microbial communities and precisely remove only the bad actors from those communities?’”

Thanks to a $1.5 million grant from the Kleberg Foundation, Chappell’s lab and the lab of Rice bioscientist and bioengineer Jonathan “Joff” Silberg are getting a chance to test their idea of combating antibiotic resistance by enlisting the aid of bacteria that either benefit humans or pose no threat to them.

In prototype tests, they showed they could design RNA programs that were highly targeted and potent, killing 99.99% of “bad actor” pathogens within a matter of hours. In the three-year project, they also plan to partner with Dr. Pablo Okhuysen from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center to design RNA antibiotics that are effective against diarrhea-causing E. coli, as well as RNA drugs that selectively kill the opportunistic Lactobacillus iners, a pathogen that has been associated with cervical cancer radiation therapy resistance.

Epilepsy could become easier to pinpoint with blood test

Researchers from Lund University in Sweden have discovered higher levels of immune proteins in the blood before and after an epileptic seizure. The possible biomarkers can be identified using a simple blood test. Diagnosing epilepsy is currently resource intensive, and distinguishing it from other conditions can be challenging. Better diagnostic methods as soon as the patient seeks medical care after a suspected seizure is therefore an urgent necessity.

Epilepsy is the collective name for abnormal activity in the brain that causes temporary loss of control of behavior and movement. The condition can be congenital, be caused by a tumor, stroke or infection in the brain and cause very different symptoms depending on which part of the brain the episode begins in or spreads to. Inflammation processes that start as an immune response in the body can also provoke a seizure. That is why researchers started to look for possible biomarkers for epilepsy within the immune system. Previous studies exist, but the results have so far been mixed and difficult to interpret:

“In our study, we have a carefully selected group of participants and we have a lot of background information on each person. We have also taken into account a number of confounding factors that may affect the immune system such as other neurological and immunological illnesses, infections and various psychiatric conditions,” says Christine Ekdahl Clementson.

New “traffic cop” algorithm helps a drone swarm stay on task

MIT engineers have developed a method to tailor any wireless network to handle a high load of time-sensitive data coming from multiple sources.
Illustration Credit: Christine Daniloff, MIT
(CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

How fresh is your data? For drones searching a disaster zone or robots inspecting a building, working with the freshest data is key to locating a survivor or reporting a potential hazard. But when multiple robots simultaneously relay time-sensitive information over a wireless network, a traffic jam of data can ensue. Any information that gets through is too stale to consider as a useful, real-time report.

Now, MIT engineers may have a solution. They’ve developed a method to tailor any wireless network to handle a high load of time-sensitive data coming from multiple sources. Their new approach, called WiSwarm, configures a wireless network to control the flow of information from multiple sources while ensuring the network is relaying the freshest data.

The team used their method to tweak a conventional Wi-Fi router, and showed that the tailored network could act like an efficient traffic cop, able to prioritize and relay the freshest data to keep multiple vehicle-tracking drones on task.

The team’s method, which they will present in May at IEEE’s International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), offers a practical way for multiple robots to communicate over available Wi-Fi networks so they don’t have to carry bulky and expensive communications and processing hardware onboard.

High-performance detectors to combat spies

Using these sensors, scientists were able to generate a secret key at a rate of 64 megabits per second over 10 km of fibre optic cable.
Photo Credit: © M. Perrenoud - G. Resta / UNIGE

A team from UNIGE and ID Quantique has developed single-photon detectors with unprecedented performance. These results open new perspectives for quantum cryptography.

How can we combat data theft, which is a real issue for society? Quantum physics has the solution. Its theories make it possible to encode information (a qubit) in single particles of light (a photon) and to circulate them in an optical fiber in a highly secure way. However, the widespread use of this telecommunications technology is hampered in particular by the performance of the single-photon detectors. A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), together with the company ID Quantique, has succeeded in increasing their speed by a factor of twenty. This innovation, to be discovered in the journal Nature Photonics, makes it possible to achieve unprecedented performances in quantum key distribution.

Buying a train ticket, booking a taxi, getting a meal delivered: these are all transactions carried out daily via mobile applications. These are based on payment systems involving an exchange of secret information between the user and the bank. To do this, the bank generates a public key, which is transmitted to their customer, and a private key, which it keeps secret. With the public key, the user can modify the information, make it unreadable and send it to the bank. With the private key, the bank can decipher it.

New tool for diagnosing and evaluating the severity of sarcopenia

From left to right, researchers from the Faculty of Medicine and Welfare of WITH (Campus Bellvige) Maribel Miguel, Ingrid Mötller and Joan Basi.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of University of Barcelona

Sarcopenia is a degenerative disease characterized by a pathological decrease in muscle strength that especially affects older people. Researchers at the University of Barcelona have developed a new tool to assess the presence and severity of this muscle failure. The study, published in the journal RMD Open, provides a muscle quality scoring system based on musculoskeletal ultrasound, which has been validated with anatomical and histological samples of patients. It is the first imaging method that assesses muscle quality, an essential factor in the disease. According to researchers, these results could be useful "not only for diagnostic purposes, but also for monitoring patients in clinical practice and also in clinical trials.".

Researchers from the Human Anatomy and Embryology Unit and the Histology Unit of the Department of Pathology and Experimental Therapeutic Therapeutic Tepell de la Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences (Campus Bellvige) of the UB. Also, experts from the Puigvert Foundation, the University of Genoa, the University of Oslo and the University of Copenhagen have been trained.

New biosensor reveals activity of elusive metal that’s essential for life

Nuclear magnetic resonance shows the structure of a natural protein called lanmodulin, which binds rare earth elements with high selectivity and was discovered 5 years ago by Penn State researchers. Researchers recently genetically reprogramed the protein to favor manganese over other common transition metals like iron and copper.
Illustration Credit: Courtesy Cotruvo Lab | Pennsylvania State University
(CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

A new biosensor engineered by Penn State researchers offers scientists the first dynamic glimpses of manganese, an elusive metal ion that is essential for life.

The researchers engineered the sensor from a natural protein called lanmodulin, which binds rare earth elements with high selectivity and was discovered 5 years ago by some of the Penn State researchers involved in the present study.

They were able to genetically reprogram the protein to favor manganese over other common transition metals like iron and copper, which defies the trends observed with most transition metal-binding molecules.

The sensor could have broad applications in biotechnology to advance understanding of photosynthesis, host-pathogen interactions and neurobiology. It could also be potentially applied more generally for processes such as separation of the transition metal components (manganese, cobalt, and nickel) in lithium-ion battery recycling.

Why are mammals more likely to go extinct on islands than on the mainland?

Illustration of Sardinian Dwarf Mammoth, Sardinian Giant Otter, Deer, Sardinian Dhole and Giant Pica
 Illustration Credit: Peter Schouten

Islands are "laboratories of evolution" and home to animal species with many unique features, including dwarfs that evolved to very small sizes compared to their mainland relatives, and giants that evolved to large sizes. A team of researchers from the German Centre of Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) has now found that species that evolved to more extreme body sizes compared to their mainland relatives have a higher risk of extinction than those that evolved to less extreme sizes. Their study, which was published in Science, also shows that extinction rates of mammals on islands worldwide increased significantly after the arrival of modern humans.

Islands are hotspots for biodiversity - they cover less than 7% of the Earth’s land area, but account for up to 20% of all terrestrial species on the planet. However, islands are also hotspots for species extinction as 50% of today’s IUCN threatened species are native to islands. 

Invasive Grass in Texas Uses Chemical Warfare to Crowd Out Native Species

Photo Credit: Courtesy of University of Texas at Austin

An invasive grass causing havoc in Texas and contributing to wildfires packs a one-two wallop against native plants. Guinea grass uses a combination of crowding that blocks out light from growing seedlings and what amounts to a chemical warfare in soil that is toxic to native plants, according to a new study by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.

The findings are published in the journal Ecosphere.

Guinea grass is one of the most ecologically damaging invasive species in the world, arriving in South Texas from Africa more than 100 years ago, to help feed cattle. In the past 20 years, it has spread aggressively across the region and can now be found along roadsides as far north as Austin, bringing with it the risk of more frequent, high-intensity wildfires.

The researchers said knowing about how an invasive species takes over an area is an important step in figuring out how to control and reduce it in the environment.

“The shading and the chemical toxins are each effective at pushing out native plants on their own, but combined, the negative effects increased dramatically,” said Colin Morrison, a graduate student in the Department of Integrative Biology who is the lead author on the paper.

Researchers find access to new fluorescent materials

Cover picture of Chemical Science. The glow of the glow-worm, which represents the class of phospholes, grows more intense as a result of modification.
Illustration Credit: Dr Christoph Selg.

Fluorescence is a fascinating natural phenomenon. It is based on the fact that certain materials can absorb light of a certain wavelength and then emit light of a different wavelength. Fluorescent materials play an important role in our everyday lives, for example in modern screens. Due to the high demand for applications, science is constantly striving to produce new and easily accessible molecules with high fluorescence efficiency. Chemist Professor Evamarie Hey-Hawkins from Leipzig University and her colleagues have specialized in a particular class of fluorescent materials – phospholes. These consist of hydrocarbon frameworks with a central phosphorus atom. In experiments with this substance, Nils König from Hey-Hawkins’ working group has found access to new fluorescent materials. He has now published his findings in the journal Chemical Science.

“Phospholes can be modified by certain chemical reactions, which has a major impact on the color and efficiency of the fluorescence of the molecule. Another special feature of these substances is their propeller-like structure,” explains König. When these molecules are dissolved in a solvent and exposed to UV light, they do not fluoresce. The absorbed energy is released in the form of rotational motion, causing the molecules to spin like a propeller in the solvent. In a crystalline state, however, the ability to rotate is severely limited, which makes the substances fluoresce strongly under UV light. This behavior is known as aggregation-induced emission (AIE).

Cause of leukemia in trisomy 21

Bone marrow smear from a child with Down syndrome who suffers from leukemia. The purple-colored leukemic blasts displace normal blood formation.
Photo Credit: Jan Klusmann, University Hospital Frankfurt

People with a third copy of chromosome 21, known as trisomy 21, are at high risk of developing Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML), an aggressive form of blood cancer. Scientists led by the Department of Pediatrics at University Hospital Frankfurt have now identified the cause: although the additional chromosome 21 leads to increased gene dosage of many genes, it is above all the perturbation of the RUNX1 gene – a gene that regulates many other genes – that seems to be responsible for AML pathogenesis. Targeting the perturbed regulator could pave the way for new therapies. 

Leukemia (blood cancer) is a group of malignant and aggressive diseases of the blood-forming cells in the bone marrow. Very intensive chemotherapy and in some cases a bone marrow transplant are the only cure. Like all cancers, leukemia is caused by changes in the DNA, the heredity material present in human cells in the form of 46 chromosomes. In many forms of leukemia, large parts of these chromosomes are altered. People with Down syndrome, who have three copies of chromosome 21 (trisomy 21), are highly vulnerable: the risk of developing aggressive Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) in the first four years of their life is more than 100 times greater for children with Down syndrome. Down syndrome is the most common congenital genetic disorder, affecting about one in 700 newborn babies. 

Delaying treatment for localized prostate cancer does not increase mortality risk, trial shows

Photo Credit: Max

Active monitoring of prostate cancer has the same high survival rates after 15 years as radiotherapy or surgery, reports the largest study of its kind today. The latest findings from the ProtecT trial, led by the Universities of Oxford and Bristol, are presented today at the European Association of Urology (EAU) Congress in Milan and published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Although men on active monitoring – which involves regular tests to check on the cancer – were more likely to see it progress or spread than those receiving radiotherapy or surgery, this didn’t reduce their likelihood of survival.

The trial also found that the negative impacts of radiotherapy and surgery on urinary and sexual function persist much longer than previously thought – for up to 12 years.

The findings show that treatment decisions following diagnosis for low and intermediate risk localized prostate cancer do not need to be rushed, according to lead investigator, Professor Freddie Hamdy from the University of Oxford.

Revolutionary new bone cancer drug could save children's lives

Osteosarcoma, Bone Cancer Cell
Cancer that starts in the bones, rather than cancer that has spread to the bone, predominantly affects children and young adults
Image Credit: National Cancer Institute

A new drug that works against the main types of primary bone cancer has been developed by researchers at the University of East Anglia and University of Sheffield.

Cancer that starts in the bones, rather than cancer that has spread to bone, predominantly affects children and young adults.      

Current treatment is brutal, with outdated chemotherapy cocktails and limb amputation leading to life-long disabilities.

Even after these grueling treatments, the five-year survival rate is still poor at just 42 per cent – largely because of how rapidly bone cancer spreads to the lungs. These rates haven’t changed in nearly half a century.

But a new study published in the Journal of Bone Oncology shows how a new drug called ‘CADD522’ blocks a gene associated with driving the cancer’s spread, in mice implanted with human bone cancer.

A pool at Yellowstone is a thumping thermometer

The interval of thumps at Doublet Pool offers insight into the fluctuations of energy in the Yellowstone hydrothermal system.
Photo Credit: Jacob W. Frank / U.S. National Park Service

While the crowds swarm around Old Faithful to wait for its next eruption, a little pool just north of Yellowstone National Park’s most famous geyser is quietly showing off its own unique activity, also at more-or-less regular showtimes. Instead of erupting in a towering geyser, though, Doublet Pool cranks up the bass every 20 to 30 minutes by thumping. The water vibrates and the ground shakes.

Doublet Pool’s regular thumping is more than just an interesting tourist attraction. A new study led by University of Utah researchers shows that the interval between episodes of thumping reflects the amount of energy heating the pool at the bottom, as well as in indication of how much heat is being lost through the surface. Doublet Pool, the authors found, is Yellowstone’s thumping thermometer.

“By studying Doublet Pool, we are hoping to gain knowledge on the dynamic hydrothermal processes that can potentially be applied to understand what controls geyser eruptions,” said Fan-Chi Lin, an associate professor in the department of geology and geophysics at the U and a study co-author, “and also less predictable and more hazardous hydrothermal explosions.”

The study is published in Geophysical Research Letters.

New Tool for Understanding Disease

Lina Pradham (left), a post-doctoral researcher in the Kloxin Group points out dormant breast cancer cells in 3D cultures imaged using confocal microscopy to UD engineer April Kloxin, Thomas and Kipp Gutshall Development Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. In the image, the dormant cells (shown in green) are viable, not proliferating, and remain capable of proliferating upon stimulation.
Photo Credit: Evan Krape / University of Delaware

UD model illuminates environmental cues that may contribute to breast cancer recurrence

Nearly 270,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with breast cancer each year. 

According to the Susan G. Komen Foundation, about 70-80% of these individuals experience estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancer, where cancer cells need estrogen to grow. In terms of treatment, this presence of hormone receptors provides a nice handle for targeting tumors, say with therapies that knock out the tumor cell’s ability to bind to estrogen and prevent remaining breast cancer cells from growing.

However, even if treated successfully, on average, one in five individuals with ER+ breast cancer experiences a late recurrence when dormant tumor cells in distant parts of the body, such as the bone marrow, reactivate anywhere from 5 to over 20 years after initial treatment.