Drinking sufficient water could prevent heart failure

Staying well-hydrated throughout life could reduce the risk of developing heart failure, according to research presented at ESC Congress 2021.

“Our study suggests that maintaining good hydration can prevent or at least slow down the changes within the heart that lead to heart failure,” said study author Dr. Natalia Dmitrieva of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, US. “The findings indicate that we need to pay attention to the amount of fluid we consume every day and take action if we find that we drink too little.”

Recommendations on daily fluid intake vary from 1.6 to 2.1 litres for women and 2 to 3 litres for men. However, worldwide surveys have shown that many people do not meet even the lower ends of these ranges. Serum sodium is a precise measure of hydration status: when people drink less fluid, the concentration of serum sodium increases. The body then attempts to conserve water, activating processes known to contribute to the development of heart failure.

Dr. Dmitrieva said: “It is natural to think that hydration and serum sodium should change day to day depending on how much we drink on each day. However, serum sodium concentration remains within a narrow range over long periods,3 which is likely related to habitual fluid consumption.”

This study examined whether serum sodium concentration in middle age, as a measure of hydration habits, predicts the development of heart failure 25 years later. The researchers also examined the connection between hydration and thickening of the walls of the heart's main pumping chamber (left ventricle) – called left ventricular hypertrophy – which is a precursor to heart failure diagnosis.

The analysis was performed in 15,792 adults in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study. Participants were 44 to 66 years old at recruitment and were evaluated over five visits until age 70 to 90.

Participants were divided into four groups based on their average serum sodium concentration at study visits one and two (conducted in the first three years): 135–139.5, 140–141.5, 142–143.5, and 144–146 mmol/l. For each sodium group, the researchers then analysed the proportion of people who developed heart failure and left ventricular hypertrophy at visit five (25 years later).

Higher serum sodium concentration in midlife was associated with both heart failure and left ventricular hypertrophy 25 years later. Serum sodium remained significantly associated with heart failure and left ventricular hypertrophy after adjusting for other factors related to the development of heart failure: age, blood pressure, kidney function, blood cholesterol, blood glucose, body mass index, sex and smoking status. Every 1 mmol/l increase in serum sodium concentration in midlife was associated with 1.20 and 1.11 increased odds of developing left ventricular hypertrophy and heart failure, respectively, 25 years later.

The risks of both left ventricular hypertrophy and heart failure at age 70 to 90 began to increase when serum sodium exceeded 142 mmol/l in midlife.

Read more at Science Daily

Studying mosquito immune cells could improve understanding of disease transmission

A new study that details mosquito immune cells could shed light on the insect immune system and how mosquitoes transmit parasites that cause malaria.

A new study, published recently in the peer-reviewed scientific journal eLife, identifies several new forms of mosquito immune cells, providing new clarity into the mosquito immune system. Immune cells play a central role in the immune response of mosquitoes toward malaria parasites and viruses after these pathogens are taken up upon feeding on an infected person. It's a field of study that has remained poorly understood due to the lack of genetic tools, said Ryan Smith, an associate professor of entomology at Iowa State University and lead author of the study.

"These experiments lay the foundation for a better understanding of how these immune cells function that could lead to a future when humans are able to make mosquitoes unable to transmit disease," Smith said.

The new study utilized single-cell RNA sequencing, a relatively new technique that allows researchers to examine the cellular messages within individual cells, to characterize mosquito immune cells, known as hemocytes. The study found mosquito hemocytes show greater complexity than previously thought, evidence of cell differentiation, and that some cells may even undergo a maturation process. The authors also provided comparative analysis to single-cell studies in other insect systems, highlighting important similarities and differences between mosquitoes and other insects. The new study is an important first step for future exploration of the mosquito immune system, which could be important for gaining better understanding of how mosquitoes transmit pathogens, such as malaria parasites, to humans through their bite.

"There's a big body of evidence that suggests that immune cells of mosquitoes are really critical to their ability to transmit disease," Smith said. "From that perspective, we haven't really known a great deal about the molecular aspect of what those immune cells look like."

Previous evidence suggests immune cells mediate disease pathways in mosquitoes, and play vital roles in killing malaria parasites at multiple stages in the mosquito host. The new study sets the stage for future research aimed at answering those questions, he said.

Smith even envisions a future, though it's still years away, when this line of research could lead to the production of mosquitoes genetically modified to overexpress certain immune cell populations that reduce the ability of a mosquito to transmit pathogens that cause mosquito-borne disease. These resistant mosquitoes could then be introduced into wild mosquito populations to breed and spread these genetic traits. The result could be mosquito populations that are less likely to spread disease to humans, though Smith cautions it's all purely theoretical at this point.

Read more at Science Daily

Male Y chromosome facilitates the evolution of sex differences in body size

Females and males differ in many ways and yet they share the same genome. The only exception is the male Y chromosome. Using beetles as a study system, new research from Uppsala University, now published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, shows that despite of the Y chromosome containing very few genes, it can dramatically change male body size and thus facilitate the evolution of sex differences.

Females and males typically differ in many ways in their morphology, physiology and behaviour. How such sex differences, known as sexual dimorphism, evolve is a puzzle because females and males share the same set of genes and an evolutionary change in one sex should cause a correlated change even in the other sex, thereby preventing sex differences from evolving. The new study shows that even small amounts of genetic differences between the sexes can facilitate the evolution of sexual dimorphism such that it can evolve in just a few generations.

"Our experiments show that the autosomes as well as both sex chromosomes, the X and Y, can harbor genetic variation important for sexual dimorphism, but the Y chromosome alone can alter the sex difference in size by as much as 30 percent. This is remarkable because in these beetles the Y chromosome contains just a handful of genes and represents a very small fraction of the genome, just like in humans. Many have thought that the Y only affects the most important reproductive processes in males, namely sperm production. Our findings suggest that the Y chromosome may have a broader role than previously appreciated," says Philipp Kaufmann, a PhD student at the Uppsala University's Department of Ecology and Genetics and the first author of the study.

The evolution of sexual dimorphism is however not only dependent on where in the genome genetic variation resides, but also on how natural and sexual selection can act on it. With the help of lab evolution, the research team showed that sexual size dimorphism could evolve when selecting on male size, but that when selection acted only on females, the shared part of the genome caused a correlated evolutionary response in males preventing dimorphism from evolving.

"The most drastic change in sexual dimorphism, an increase by 50 percent in only ten generations, occurred when we applied selection sexually antagonistically -- favoring the opposite body size in the two sexes. This shows that under right kind of selection sex differences can clearly evolve rapidly, perhaps more easily than was previously thought," says Elina Immonen, Assistant Professor at the Department of Ecology and Genetics, Uppsala University, and the principle investigator of the study.

"Combining information of what kind of genetic variation is available to selection with different forms of selection is a powerful way to test the determinants of evolution of sex differences. By isolating the effect of Y chromosome variation from the rest of the genome, we could directly demonstrate how large the effect of the Y chromosome is, something we didn't expect to see when we started the work and this has helped understand how sexual dimorphism has evolved in this species. Future work will tell us more regarding how the Y chromosome can have such a large effect on males and how general its role is in the evolution of sex differences across taxa," Immonen concludes.

Read more at Science Daily

Geologists dig into Grand Canyon's mysterious gap in time

A new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder reveals the complex history behind one of the Grand Canyon's most well-known geologic features: A mysterious and missing gap of time in the canyon's rock record that covers hundreds of millions of years.

The research comes closer to solving a puzzle, called the "Great Unconformity," that has perplexed geologists since it was first described nearly 150 years ago.

Think of the red bluffs and cliffs of the Grand Canyon as Earth's history textbook, explained Barra Peak, lead author of the new study and a graduate student in geological sciences at CU Boulder. If you scale down the canyon's rock faces, you can jump back almost 2 billion years into the planet's past. But that textbook is also missing pages: In some areas, more than 1 billion years' worth of rocks have disappeared from the Grand Canyon without a trace.

Geologists want to know why.

"The Great Unconformity is one of the first well-documented geologic features in North America," Peak said. "But until recently, we didn't have a lot of constraints on when or how it occurred."

Now, she and her colleagues think they may be narrowing in on an answer in a paper published this month in the journal Geology. The team reports that a series of small yet violent faulting events may have rocked the region during the breakup of an ancient supercontinent called Rodinia. The resulting havoc likely tore up the earth around the canyon, causing rocks and sediment to wash away and into the ocean.

The team's findings could help scientists fill in missing pieces of what happened during this critical period for the Grand Canyon -- today one of North America's foremost natural wonders.

"We have new analytical methods in our lab that allow us to decipher the history in the missing window of time across the Great Unconformity," said Rebecca Flowers, coauthor of the new study and a professor of geological sciences. "We are doing this in the Grand Canyon and at other Great Unconformity localities across North America."

Beautiful lines

It's a mystery that goes back a long way. John Wesley Powell, the namesake of today's Lake Powell, first saw the Great Unconformity during his famed 1869 expedition by boat down the rapids of the Colorado River.

Peak, who completed a similar research rafting trip through the Grand Canyon in spring 2021, said that the feature is stark enough that you can see it from the river.

"There are beautiful lines," Peak said. "At the bottom, you can see very clearly that there are rocks that have been pushed together. Their layers are vertical. Then there there's a cutoff, and above that you have these beautiful horizontal layers that form the buttes and peaks that you associate with the Grand Canyon."

The difference between those two types of rocks is significant. In the western part of the canyon toward Lake Mead, the basement stone is 1.4 to 1.8 billion years old. The rocks sitting on top, however, are just 520 million years old. Since Powell's voyage, scientists have seen evidence of similar periods of lost time at sites around North America.

"There's more than a billion years that's gone," Peak said. "It's also a billion years during an interesting part of Earth's history where the planet is transitioning from an older setting to the modern Earth we know today."

A continent splits

To explore the transition, Peak and her colleagues employed a method called "thermochronology," which tracks the history of heat in stone. Peak explained that, when geologic formations are buried deep underground, the pressure building on top of them can cause them to get toasty. That heat, in turn, leaves a trace in the chemistry of minerals in those formations.

Using this approach, the researchers conducted a survey of samples of rock collected from throughout the Grand Canyon. They discovered that the history of this feature may be more convoluted than scientists have assumed. In particular, the western half of the canyon and its eastern portion (the part that tourists are most familiar with) may have undergone different geologic contortions throughout time.

"It's not a single block with the same temperature history," Peak said.

Roughly 700 million years ago, basement rock in the west seems to have risen to the surface. In the eastern half, however, that same stone was under kilometers of sediment.

The difference likely came down to the breakup of Rodinia, a gigantic land mass that began to pull apart at about the same time, Peak said. The researchers results suggest that this major upheaval may have torn at the eastern and western halves of the Grand Canyon in different ways and at slightly different times -- producing the Great Unconformity in the process.

Peak and her colleagues are now looking at other sites of the Great Unconformity in North America to see how general this picture might be. For now, she's excited to watch geologic history play out in one of the country's most picturesque landscapes.

"There are just so many things there that aren't present anywhere else," she said. "It's a really amazing natural lab."

Read more at Science Daily

Interstellar comets like Borisov may not be all that rare

In 2019, astronomers spotted something incredible in our backyard: a rogue comet from another star system. Named Borisov, the icy snowball traveled 110,000 miles per hour and marked the first and only interstellar comet ever detected by humans.

But what if these interstellar visitors -- comets, meteors, asteroids and other debris from beyond our solar system -- are more common than we think?

In a new study published Monday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, astronomers Amir Siraj and Avi Loeb at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) present new calculations showing that in the Oort Cloud -- a shell of debris in the farthest reaches of our solar system -- interstellar objects outnumber objects belonging to our solar system.

"Before the detection of the first interstellar comet, we had no idea how many interstellar objects there were in our solar system, but theory on the formation of planetary systems suggests that there should be fewer visitors than permanent residents," says Siraj, a concurrent undergraduate and graduate student in Harvard's Department of Astronomy and lead author of the study. "Now we're finding that there could be substantially more visitors."

The calculations, made using conclusions drawn from Borisov, include significant uncertainties, Siraj points out. But even after taking these into consideration, interstellar visitors prevail over objects that are native to the solar system.

"Let's say I watch a mile-long stretch of railroad for a day and observe one car cross it. I can say that, on that day, the observed rate of cars crossing the section of railroad was one per day per mile," Siraj explains. "But if I have a reason to believe that the observation was not a one-off event -- say, by noticing a pair of crossing gates built for cars -- then I can take it a step further and begin to make statistical conclusions about the overall rate of cars crossing that stretch of railroad."

But if there are so many interstellar visitors, why have we only ever seen one?

We just don't have the technology to see them yet, Siraj says.

Consider, he says, that the Oort Cloud spans a region some 200 billion to 100 trillion miles away from our Sun -- and unlike stars, objects in the Oort Cloud don't produce their own light. Those two factors make debris in the outer solar system incredibly hard to see.

Senior astrophysicist Matthew Holman, who was not involved in the research, says the study results are exciting because they have implications for objects even closer than the Oort Cloud.

"These results suggest that the abundances of interstellar and Oort cloud objects are comparable closer to the Sun than Saturn. This can be tested with current and future solar system surveys," says Holman, who is the former director of the CfA's Minor Planet Center, which tracks comets, asteroids and other debris in the solar system.

"When looking at the asteroid data in that region, the question is: are there asteroids that really are interstellar that we just didn't recognize before?" he asks.

Holman explains that there are some asteroids that get detected but aren't observed or followed up on year after year. "We think they are asteroids, then we lose them without doing a detailed look."

Loeb, study co-author and Harvard astronomy professor, adds that "interstellar objects in the planetary region of the solar system would be rare, but our results clearly show they are more common than solar system material in the dark reaches of the Oort cloud."

Observations with next-generation technology may help confirm the team's results.

The launch of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, slated for 2022, will "blow previous searches for interstellar objects out of the water," Siraj says, and hopefully help detect many more visitors like Borisov.

The Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II), which is specifically designed to detect comets in the far reaches of our solar system, may also be able to detect one of these passersby. TAOS II may come online as early as this year.

The abundance of interstellar objects in the Oort Cloud suggests that much more debris is left over from the formation of planetary systems than previously thought, Siraj says.

Read more at Science Daily

The Hobbit’s bite gets a stress test

If you've ever suffered from a sore jaw that popped or clicked when you chewed gum or crunched hard foods, you may be able to blame it on your extinct ancestors.

That's according to a Duke University-led study of the chewing mechanics of an ancient human relative called Homo floresiensis, which inhabited the Indonesian island of Flores before our species arrived there some 50,000 years ago.

Not much more than three feet tall, the hominin's diminutive size earned it the nickname "the Hobbit," after the characters in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings." For the new study, which was published Aug. 13 in the journal Interface Focus, the researchers wanted to understand how the Hobbit's skull behaved while it ate its food.

However, thousands of years of fossilization had left its skull -- the only one that has been found so far -- damaged and misshapen. Before the researchers could test it out, they had to restore it as close to its original shape as possible. Collaborators at Italy's University of Bologna created a 3D virtual model, built from X-ray CT scans, digitally filling in the missing pieces to reconstruct what the skull of Homo floresiensis might have looked like when it roamed the island some 100,000 to 60,000 years ago.

From that, they used computer simulations and a technique called finite element analysis to give the virtual skull characteristics that mimic the real thing, such as the stiffness of the bones and the pulling action of the muscles. Then they had the virtual skull chomp down with its back teeth -- premolars and molars -- and analyzed the forces at work with each bite, essentially subjecting it to a digital crash test.

The researchers mapped the strains within their digital model of the Hobbit's facial bones during biting, comparing the results to similar simulations for earlier human relatives called australopiths that lived some two to three million years ago in Africa, along with chimpanzees and humans living today.

The team determined that the Hobbit's bite could have exerted around 1300 Newtons of force, comparable to the chomping power of modern humans and several of our extinct cousins. But had it bitten down too vigorously on a hard nut or a tough hunk of meat, the findings suggest Homo floresiensis would have been at greater risk than our earlier human kin of straining its facial bones, or dislocating the joint where the lower and upper jaws meet.

"We don't really know what Homo floresiensis ate," said first author Rebecca Cook, a doctoral student in evolutionary anthropology at Duke. Patterns of wear on the teeth, combined with pygmy elephant bones and other animal remains unearthed from the same cave where the Hobbit was found suggest that it ate at least some meat.

But the results suggest that exceedingly hard or tough foods, which would have been no problem for an australopith to gnaw on or crack open, might have given the Hobbit a TMJ headache.

"Similar patterns are observed in modern humans," Cook said.

Millions of years of human evolution gave us smaller teeth and more lightweight skulls, because cooking our food and slicing and pounding it with stone tools, and probably also eating meat, made having overbuilt skulls unnecessary.

But years after the Hobbit's discovery its facial features remain a puzzle. Its skull had a curious mix of traits, some of which -- like its heavyset lower jaw -- are similar to our earlier and more ape-like ancestors, while others -- like its small delicate face -- resemble humans today.

"This can make it confusing as to where this species falls on the family tree of hominin evolutionary relationships," Cook said.

The new study suggests this shift to smaller faces, weaker bites and achey jaws evolved early, before the common ancestors of Homo floresiensis and modern humans went their separate ways.

Justin Ledogar, Duke researcher and senior author of the study, says the next step is to do similar analyses on earlier members of the genus Homo, including Homo erectus. The first known hominin to use fire and cook food, this species also had smaller teeth, jaws and faces than earlier hominins, and is thought by some to be the ancestor of Homo floresiensis.

The researchers say the work could help answer lingering questions about where Homo floresiensis came from, how it lived and how it fits into the human evolutionary tree.

Read more at Science Daily

Lightweight composite material inspects itself: Changes in color indicate deformations

ETH Zurich researchers have developed a new type of laminate that changes colour as soon as the material is deformed. This way, the materials researchers can kill two birds with one stone: a lightweight composite material that inspects itself.

Lightweight construction has found its way into many areas, especially automotive manufacturing, shipbuilding and aircraft construction. In addition to traditional lightweight metals such as aluminium, magnesium or titanium, load-​bearing applications are increasingly featuring composite materials. This is driving a concurrent need to develop new techniques and methods for the early detection of damage to or even the possible failure of such as yet understudied materials.

Researchers from the Complex Materials Group at ETH Zurich, working in collaboration with researchers from the University of Fribourg, have now adopted an approach that has recently garnered attention in materials research: they have created a lightweight material that uses a colour change to indicate internal deformation and thus possible material failure at an early stage. Composed of individual layers, their laminate is translucent, break-​resistant and yet very lightweight.

Artificial mother-​of-pearl combined with polymer

The laminate is composed of alternating layers of a plastic polymer and artificial nacre or mother-​of-pearl. The latter is a speciality of the Complex Materials Laboratory and is modelled on the biological example of the mussel shell. It consists of countless glass platelets arranged in parallel, which are compacted, sintered and solidified using an polymeric resin. This makes it extremely hard and break-​resistant.

The second layer consists of a polymer to which the researchers added an indicator molecule synthesised specifically for this application at the University of Fribourg. The molecule is activated as soon as the polymer experiences stretching forces, and this changes its fluorescence. The more the material stretches and the more of these molecules are activated, the more intense the fluorescence becomes.

Fluorescence indicates overstressed parts

"We used fluorescent molecules because you can measure the increase in fluorescence very well and you don't have to rely on subjective perception," says Tommaso Magrini, lead author of the study, which was recently published in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces. The system could also have been set up to produce a colour change that would be directly perceptible from the outside. But: "The perception of colours is subjective and it is difficult to draw conclusions about changes in the material," Magrini says.

With the help of fluorescence, the researchers can now identify overstressed areas within the composite material even before fractures form. This allows early detection of vulnerable areas in a structure before catastrophic failure occurs. One possible application of the novel laminate is in components in the load-​bearing structures found in buildings, aircraft or vehicles, where it is essential to detect their failure at an early stage.

Read more at Science Daily

Gene editing could render mosquitoes infertile, reducing disease spread

Mosquitoes spread viruses that cause potentially deadly diseases such as Zika, dengue fever and yellow fever. New U.S. Army-funded research uses gene editing to render certain male mosquitoes infertile and slow the spread of these diseases.

Researchers at the Army's Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies and the University of California Santa Barbara used a gene editing tool known as CRISPR-Cas9 to target a specific gene tied to fertility in male mosquitoes. CRISPR-Cas9 is a genome editing tool that is creating a buzz in the science world, according to yourgenome.org. It is "faster, cheaper and more accurate than previous techniques of editing DNA and has a wide range of potential applications."

Researchers experimented with the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which are found in tropical, subtropical and temperate regions throughout the world. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, discerned how a mutation can suppress the fertility of female mosquitoes.

"This is yet one more important and exciting example of how synthetic biology tools are demonstrating unparalleled utility," said Dr. James Burgess, ICB program manager for the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, now known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory. "In this case, it's a precision increase from chainsaw to a scalpel leading to the correct biochemical outcome that could substantially reduce the population of a very infectious mosquito."

To manage populations, scientists use a vector-control practice called the sterile insect technique in which they raise a lot of sterile male insects and they then release these males in numbers that overwhelm their wild counterparts. Females that mate with sterile males before finding a fertile one are themselves rendered infertile, thereby decreasing the size of the next generation.

Repeating this technique several times has the potential to crash the population because each generation is smaller than the last; releasing a similar number of sterile males has a stronger effect over time.

The sterile insect technique is effective in managing a number of agricultural pests, including the Mediterranean fruit fly, a crop pest in California. It has also been attempted with Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, but with limited success.

In the past, scientists used chemicals or radiation to sterilize male Aedes aegypti, but the chemicals or radiation impacted the mosquitoes' health to such an extent that they were less successful in mating with females, which undercuts the effectiveness of the sterile insect technique.

The research team wanted to identify a more targeted approach with less collateral damage, mutating a gene in mosquitoes that specifically caused male sterility without otherwise impacting the insects' health.

"When CRISPR/Cas9 came out several years ago it just offered new opportunities to do things that you couldn't do before," said Dr. Craig Montell, distinguished professor at UC Santa Barbara. "So, the time seemed right to for us to start working on Aedes aegypti."

Using gene editing in male Aedes aegypti, researchers found that the mutant male mosquitoes produced no sperm, and unlike in previous efforts, the sterile studs were otherwise completely healthy; however, the team wasn't sure whether sperm, albeit defective sperm from the sterile males, was needed to render female mosquitoes infertile, or whether the transfer of seminal fluid was all it took.

In one experiment, researchers introduced 15 mutant males into a group of 15 females for 24 hours. Then they swapped the males for 15 wild-type males, and left them there.

"Essentially, all of the females remained sterile," Montell said. "This confirmed that males could suppress female fertility without producing sperm."

Next the researchers set out to determine how timing played into the effect. They exposed the females to mutant males for different lengths of time. The scientists noticed little difference after 30 minutes, but female fertility quickly dropped after that. Montell noted that females copulated twice on average, even during the first 10 minutes. This indicated that females have to mate with many sterile males before being rendered infertile themselves.

Combining the females with the males for four hours cut female fertility to 20% of normal levels. After eight hours the numbers began leveling out around 10%.

According to Montell, Aedes aegypti populations could easily bounce back from an 80% drop in fertility. The success of sterile insect technique comes from subsequent, successive releases of sterile males, where each release will be more effective than the last as sterile males account for an ever-growing proportion of the population.

The team plans to continue investigating mosquito mating behaviors and fertility. They are devising a way to maintain stocks of males so they are only sterile in the wild and not in the lab. In addition, they are characterizing male mating behavior to uncover new ways to suppress mosquito populations.

Read more at Science Daily

Here comes the Sun: Planetary scientists find evidence of solar-driven change on the Moon

Tiny iron nanoparticles unlike any found naturally on Earth are nearly everywhere on the Moon -- and scientists are trying to understand why. A new study led by Northern Arizona University doctoral candidate Christian J. Tai Udovicic, in collaboration with associate professor Christopher Edwards, both of NAU's Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science, uncovered important clues to help understand the surprisingly active lunar surface. In an article recently published in Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists found that solar radiation could be a more important source of lunar iron nanoparticles than previously thought.

Asteroid impacts and solar radiation affect the Moon in unique ways because it lacks the protective magnetic field and atmosphere that protect us here on Earth. Both asteroids and solar radiation break down lunar rocks and soil, forming iron nanoparticles (some smaller, some larger) that are detectable from instruments on satellites orbiting the Moon. The study used data from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) spacecraft to understand how quickly iron nanoparticles form on the Moon over time.

"We have thought for a long time that the solar wind has a small effect on lunar surface evolution, when in fact it may be the most important process producing iron nanoparticles," Tai Udovicic said. "Since iron absorbs a lot of light, very small amounts of these particles can be detected from very far away -- making them a great indicator of change on the Moon."

Surprisingly, the smaller iron nanoparticles seemed to form at a similar rate as radiation damage in samples returned from the Apollo missions to the Moon, a hint that the Sun has a strong influence in their formation.

"When I saw the Apollo sample data and our satellite data side by side for the first time, I was shocked," Tai Udovicic said. "This study shows that the solar radiation could have a much larger influence in active change on the Moon than previously thought, not only darkening its surface, but it might also create small quantities of water usable in future missions."

As NASA prepares to land the first woman and the next man on the surface of the Moon by 2024 as part of the Artemis mission, understanding the solar radiation environment and possible resources on the Moon are critical. In future work recently awarded a NASA Future Investigators in Space Science and Technology (FINESST) grant, Tai Udovicic plans to broaden his targeted study to the entire Moon, but is also eager to take a closer look at mysterious lunar swirls, one of which was recently selected as a landing site for the upcoming Lunar Vertex rover. He also studies lunar temperatures and water ice stability to inform future missions.

Read more at Science Daily

Researchers develop novel strategy for tuberculosis vaccine

Innovators at Purdue University and Houston Methodist Research Institute have created a novel strategy for developing an effective vaccine for a widespread form of tuberculosis.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) is a leading cause of death worldwide, leading to over 1.5 million fatalities annually. Approximately one-third of the global population is infected with the latent form of Mtb. Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) is widely used as a vaccine against tuberculosis but has a variable protection against neonatal and adult pulmonary TB. That protection can, however, range from zero to 80% among infants. Children are routinely vaccinated, yet Mtb dissemination into brain and tuberculosis meningitis continues to occur.

Purdue and Houston Methodist researchers have created this novel TB vaccine formulation by incorporating autophagy-mediated antigen presentation, which initiates an enhanced T cell response. Chinnaswamy Jagannath, professor of pathology and genomic medicine at the Houston Methodist Research Institute, which is an affiliate of Weill Cornell Medical College, showed that the novel formulation improves the development of tuberculosis-specific immune responses. Jagannath collaborates with Dr. Suresh Mittal, Distinguished Professor of Virology in Purdue's College of Veterinary Medicine.

"Our vaccine approach is equally effective without or with prior vaccination with BCG," Mittal said.

"It is vital since the majority of people in Mtb-endemic countries are already immunized with BCG," Jagannath said.

Mittal's lab studies delivery platforms for vaccines, and Jagannath's lab used the nasal delivery route for this TB vaccine development.

"The great thing about this work with TB is that it can translate to other infectious diseases and possibly cancer immunotherapy," Mittal said.

Read more at Science Daily