A “hot Jupiter’s” dark side is revealed in detail for first time

An artists’s impression of WASP-121 b.
Credit: Mikal Evans

MIT astronomers have obtained the clearest view yet of the perpetual dark side of an exoplanet that is “tidally locked” to its star. Their observations, combined with measurements of the planet’s permanent day side, provide the first detailed view of an exoplanet’s global atmosphere.

“We’re now moving beyond taking isolated snapshots of specific regions of exoplanet atmospheres, to study them as the 3D systems they truly are,” says Thomas Mikal-Evans, who led the study as a postdoc in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

The planet at the center of the new study, which appears in Nature Astronomy, is WASP-121b, a massive gas giant nearly twice the size of Jupiter. The planet is an ultrahot Jupiter and was discovered in 2015 orbiting a star about 850 light years from Earth. WASP-121b has one of the shortest orbits detected to date, circling its star in just 30 hours. It is also tidally locked, such that its star-facing “day” side is permanently roasting, while its “night” side is turned forever toward space.  

“Hot Jupiters are famous for having very bright day sides, but the night side is a different beast. WASP-121b's night side is about 10 times fainter than its day side,” says Tansu Daylan, a TESS postdoc at MIT who co-authored the study.

Scientists engineer bacteria to cope in challenging environments

Green fluorescent protein (shown in the middle) is used by engineered bacteria as a reserve of amino acids. When nutrients become scarce, the protein can be broken down to provide essential amino acids needed for survival.
Credit: Klara Szydlo and Thomas Gorochowski

Researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Hamburg have engineered bacteria with internal nutrient reserves that can be accessed when needed to survive extreme environmental conditions. The findings, published in ACS Synthetic Biology, pave the way for more robust biotechnologies based on engineered microbes.

Synthetic Biology allows scientists to redesign organisms, harnessing their capabilities to lead to innovative solutions spanning the sustainable production of biomaterials to advanced sensing of pathogens and disease.

Dr Thomas Gorochowski, joint senior author and a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the School of Biological Sciences at Bristol, said: “Many of the engineered biological systems we have created to date are fragile and break easily when removed from the carefully controlled conditions of the lab. This makes their deployment and scale-up difficult.”

To tackle this problem, the team focused on the idea of building up reserves of protein within cells when times are good, and then breaking these down when conditions are difficult and additional nutrients are needed.

Pollination by birds can be advantageous

Photo by Philippe Donn from Pexels

Why have some plant species changed pollinators in their evolution? An international team of researchers from the Universities of Bonn and Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University Suzhou (China) studied the reproductive systems of three sister species pairs, where one species is pollinated by insects and the other by hummingbirds. Mechanisms were discovered that explain the switch from insect to bird pollination. The study has now appeared in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

Different strategies have evolved in the pollination of flowering plants. The frequency and efficiency of the flower visitor plays a role. Here, there are major differences between the various animal groups. Worldwide, insects, especially bees, are the most common pollinators. Bees usually have quite a small activity range while other pollinator groups such as hummingbirds fly much longer distances. "It was previously assumed that plants switch their pollinator group from bees to hummingbirds when the activity and thus the pollination efficiency of bees is too low or too unpredictable, for example in the high mountains," says Dr. Stefan Abrahamczyk of the Nees Institute for Plant Biodiversity at the University of Bonn. For example, in cloud forests of tropical high mountains, it is often too humid or too cold for many bees.

Self-healing materials for robotics made from ‘jelly’ and salt

The low-cost jelly-like materials, developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge, can sense strain, temperature and humidity. And unlike earlier self-healing robots, they can also partially repair themselves at room temperature.

The results are reported in the journal NPG Asia Materials.

Soft sensing technologies could transform robotics, tactile interfaces and wearable devices, among other applications. However, most soft sensing technologies aren’t durable and consume high amounts of energy.

“Incorporating soft sensors into robotics allows us to get a lot more information from them, like how strain on our muscles allows our brains to get information about the state of our bodies,” said David Hardman from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, the paper’s first author.

As part of the EU-funded SHERO project, Hardman and his colleagues have been working to develop soft sensing, self-healing materials for robotic hands and arms. These materials can detect when they are damaged, take the necessary steps to temporarily heal themselves and then resume work – all without the need for human interaction.

“We’ve been working with self-healing materials for several years, but now we’re looking into faster and cheaper ways to make self-healing robots,” said co-author Dr Thomas George-Thuruthel, also from the Department of Engineering.

Sunken ships ideal habitat for reef-building corals

Aerial view of the Baker atomic test, less than one second after the detonation. Identifiable ships are (left to right): USS Pensacola (CA-24), USS Saratoga (CV-3), USS Pennsylvania (BB-38), the former Japanese battleship Nagato, USS New York (BB-34) and USS Salt Lake City (CA-25). Some 75 years later, scientists are studying how those sunken ships are providing a home to flourishing coral colonies. Photo courtesy U.S. Navy

An hour and a half before sunrise on the morning of Feb. 17, 1944, 500 U.S. Navy Grumman Hellcats swarmed the Japanese base at Chuuk Lagoon in Micronesia, the South Pacific.

Merchant tankers, ammunition ships, a cruiser, an auxiliary cruiser, two destroyers and a minesweeper tried desperately to escape. American submarines destroyed vessels outside the lagoon while torpedo bomber and dive bomber squadrons caught ships at anchor, sending them to the bottom in minutes. By the end of the next day, 39 ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy lay in watery graves.

Today the collection of wrecks has been called one of the great underwater marvels of the world. It’s a signature destination for divers.

Opioid’s Impact on the Brain Felt Across Generations, Study in Rats Suggests

Credit: Ishmail Abdus-Saboor

New scientific evidence has emerged that opioids, the cause of an ongoing public health crisis, can have a biological impact not only on those who use them, but on their progeny. In a study of rats, males with a father repeatedly exposed to morphine tended to be more sensitive to the pain-relieving effects of the opioid. Their brains were altered by their dad’s experiences with the drug, seemingly passed down on his DNA.

Published in Science Advances, this research could lay the foundation for new approaches to curbing the opioid epidemic.

“We don’t yet know if the intergenerational effects of morphine we see in rats also occur in humans,” said first author on the paper Andre Toussaint, a PhD candidate in the Wimmer lab at Temple University. “But if they do, people with a family history of opioid use disorder might be more strongly affected by—and potentially more easily addicted to—these drugs.”

The findings, made possible by a new method of measuring pain and the alleviation of pain, also cast doubt on decades of pain research that employs older, more subjective methods.

“Although pain impacts millions of people every day, the quantitative measurement of painful experiences remains difficult for scientists to capture,” said senior author Ishmail Abdus-Saboor, PhD, who conducted this research at the University of Pennsylvania and is now a principal investigator at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute. “By rethinking how we measure pain, we are gaining a better understanding of the substances we use for pain relief.”

Targeted method for probing the function of 3D chromosomal structure

A new method—chemically induced chromosomal interaction (CICI)—can induce interactions between any two regions of the genome to test relationships between genome structure and function. The illustration (top) shows the scheme of the method. Researchers insert long arrays of binding sites into two genomic locations. These arrays are associated with a large amount of two transcription factor proteins, LacI and TetR. LacI and TetR then fuse with two additional proteins, FKBP12 and FRB, that bind in the presence of the compound rapamycin. Thus, researchers can induce the two genomic loci to strongly associate with each other by adding rapamycin to the cells and compare cellular function before and after the induced interaction. Typical data are shown below. The two loci (labeled by the red and green fluorescent dots) are spatially separated prior to the addition of rapamycin, but become co-localized after adding rapamycin.
Credit: Bai Laboratory, Pennsylvania State University

A new method that can induce interactions between specifically chosen locations on the genome allows researchers to begin to identify the causal relationship between three-dimensional chromosome structure and genome function. A paper by researchers at Penn State describing the method, called “chemically induced chromosomal interaction (CICI),” and two functional tests of the method appears in the journal Nature Communications.

The genomes of eukaryotes — organisms ranging from yeast to humans whose cells have a distinct nucleus — are made up of chromosomes. Inside the nucleus, the chromosomes, which are long, linear strands of DNA packaged with numerous proteins that carry genetic information, are arranged in a three-dimensional conformation that, depending on the cell type, can bring genomic regions that are linearly distant from one another into close enough contact to functionally interact. These interactions are thought to be important for things like gene regulation, which controls when and where certain genes are used by the cell.

Chemists discover a range of environmental contaminants in fracking wastewater

As companies that drill for oil and natural gas using hydraulic fracturing consider recycling and reusing wastewater that surfaces from wells during the fracking process, chemists at The University of Toledo discovered that the new and unexplored waste contains many environmental contaminants including organic chemicals and metallic elements.

Research scientists at UToledo’s Dr. Nina McClelland Laboratory for Water Chemistry and Environmental Analysis in collaboration with the University of Texas Arlington achieved a comprehensive characterization of the chemical composition of produced water samples extracted in Texas, indicating the presence of toxic and carcinogenic contaminants in untreated samples, which can pose a threat to wildlife and human health.

Unraveling the complex composition of produced water by specialized extraction methodologies, the results published in Environmental Science and Technology provide critical information that can help regulatory agencies fine-tune proposed guidelines related to the safe treatment and disposal of fracking wastewater to protect drinking water sources.

“The discovery of these chemicals in produced water suggests that greater monitoring and remediation efforts are needed since many of them are listed to be dangerous for human health by the World Health Organization,” said Dr. Emanuela Gionfriddo, assistant professor of analytical chemistry in the UToledo Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and the School of Green Chemistry and Engineering. “Our comprehensive characterization sheds insight into the processes taking place during hydraulic fracturing and the nature of the geologic formation of each well site.”

Bacteria in the nose may increase risk of Alzheimer’s disease

Associate Professor Jenny Ekberg, Clem Jones Centre for Neurobiology and Stem Cell Research

New research from Griffith University has shown that a bacterium commonly present in the nose can sneak into the brain and set off a cascade of events that may lead to Alzheimer’s disease.

Associate Professor Jenny Ekberg and colleagues from the Clem Jones Centre for Neurobiology and Stem Cell Research at Menzies Health Institute Queensland and Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery, in collaboration with Queensland University of Technology, have discovered that the bacterium Chlamydia pneumoniae can invade the brain via the nerves of the nasal cavity.

While this bacterium often causes respiratory tract infections, it has also been found in the brain which has raised the question of whether it causes damage to the central nervous system.

The research team has performed extensive research in animal models to show not only how the bacteria gets into the brain, but also how it leads to Alzheimer disease pathologies.

Ultraprecise atomic clock poised for new physics discoveries

One of the first steps in creating the optical atomic clocks used in this study is to cool strontium atoms to near absolute zero in a vacuum chamber, which makes them appear as a glowing blue ball floating in the chamber.
Credit: Shimon Kolkowitz

University of Wisconsin–Madison physicists have made one of the highest performance atomic clocks ever, they announced Feb. 16 in the journal Nature.

Their instrument, known as an optical lattice atomic clock, can measure differences in time to a precision equivalent to losing just one second every 300 billion years and is the first example of a “multiplexed” optical clock, where six separate clocks can exist in the same environment. Its design allows the team to test ways to search for gravitational waves, attempt to detect dark matter, and discover new physics with clocks.