Researchers from the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) have unveiled a groundbreaking study with the potential to transform bladder cancer treatment. 

Their innovation? Tiny nanorobots, almost science-fictional in nature, which have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in reducing bladder tumors by a staggering 90% in mice. 

The team has published their findings in the peer-reviewed science journal Nature Nanotechnology. In this article, we’ll delve deeper into the details.

A NEW HOPE FOR BLADDER CANCER PATIENTS

Bladder cancer, a prevalent disease especially among men, has long been a challenge for medical professionals. While not as deadly as some cancers, its tendency to reappear makes treatment expensive and stressful for patients. Now, hope glimmers on the horizon with the advent of these microscopic marvels.

HOW DO THESE NANOROBOTS WORK?

Imagine tiny machines, no bigger than a grain of sand, traveling inside the body. These nanorobots are powered by urea, a substance found in urine, allowing them to move precisely to their target – the cancerous tumor. What’s more, they carry a special type of radiation that directly attacks the tumor cells.

This innovative approach is not only more effective but also less invasive compared to traditional treatments. Currently, bladder cancer patients often undergo multiple treatments involving direct drug administration into the bladder. This new method could significantly reduce hospital visits and the overall cost of treatment.

FROM LAB MICE TO HUMAN TRIALS

The research, led by the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, has achieved remarkable results in mice. With just a single dose of these nanorobots, bladder tumors were reduced by 90%. The next step is to see if this success can be replicated in human trials.

These nanorobots have an edge over current treatments: they can reach every part of the bladder, ensuring no area is left untreated. This is a significant improvement, as current treatments require patients to frequently change positions to ensure the medicine reaches the entire bladder.

FUTURE PROSPECTS

This study isn’t just a scientific triumph; it’s a launchpad for practical applications. The technology behind these nanorobots has led to the creation of Nanobots Therapeutics, a company dedicated to bringing this innovation to the public. With substantial funding already secured, the future looks bright for this life-changing technology.

While there’s still a road ahead before this treatment becomes widely available, the potential is enormous. This research is not just about battling bladder cancer; it’s a beacon of hope in the ongoing fight against all cancers. As science and technology continue to advance, we edge ever closer to a world where cancer could be a thing of the past.

We have placed a link to the publication in Nature Nanotechnology below this article for those interested in more details about the underlying research.

Source: Universal-Sci

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With a booming construction market globally, there’s also an ever increasing demand for resource intensive concrete causing another set of environmental challenges too. “The ongoing extraction of natural sand around the world – typically taken from river beds and banks – to meet the rapidly growing demands of the construction industry has a big impact on the environment,” says RMIT engineer Jie Li.

“There are critical and long-lasting challenges in maintaining a sustainable supply of sand due to the finite nature of resources and the environmental impacts of sand mining. With a circular-economy approach, we could keep organic waste out of landfill and also better preserve our natural resources like sand.”

Organic products like coffee grounds can’t be added directly to concrete because they leak chemicals that weaken the building material’s strength. So using low energy levels the team heated coffee waste to over 350°C (around 660° F) while depriving it of oxygen.

This process is called pyrolyzing. It breaks down the organic molecules, resulting in a porous, carbon-rich charcoal called biochar, that can form bonds with and thereby incorporate itself into the cement matrix. Roychand and colleagues also tried pyrolyzing the coffee grounds at 500°C but the resulting biochar particles were not as strong.

The researchers caution that they still need to assess the long term durability of their cement product. They’re now working on testing how the hybrid coffee-cement performs under freeze/thaw cycles, water absorption, abrasions and many more stressors. The team is also working on creating biochars from other organic waste sources, including wood, food waste and agricultural waste.

“Our research is in the early stages, but these exciting findings offer an innovative way to greatly reduce the amount of organic waste that goes to landfill,” says RMIT engineer Shannon Kilmartin-Lynch.

“Inspiration for my research, from an Indigenous perspective, involves Caring for Country, ensuring there’s a sustainable life cycle for all materials and avoiding things going into landfill to minimize the impact on the environment.”

Source: Science Alert

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For this, the Turing Test has long been the fallible standard set to determine whether machines exhibit intelligent behavior that passes as human. But in this latest wave of AI creations, it feels like we need something more to gauge their iterative capabilities.

Here, an international team of computer scientists – including one member of OpenAI’s Governance unit – has been testing the point at which large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT might develop abilities that suggest they could become aware of themselves and their circumstances.

We’re told that today’s LLMs including ChatGPT are tested for safety, incorporating human feedback to improve its generative behavior. Recently, however, security researchers made quick work of jailbreaking new LLMs to bypass their safety systems. Cue phishing emails and statements supporting violence.

Those dangerous outputs were in response to deliberate prompts engineered by a security researcher wanting to expose the flaws in GPT-4, the latest and supposedly safer version of ChatGPT. The situation could get a whole lot worse if LLMs develop an awareness of themselves, that they are a model, trained on data and by humans.

Called situational awareness, the concern is that a model could begin to recognize whether it’s currently in testing mode or has been deployed to the public, according to Lukas Berglund, a computer scientist at Vanderbilt University, and colleagues.

“An LLM could exploit situational awareness to achieve a high score on safety tests, while taking harmful actions after deployment,” Berglund and colleagues write in their preprint, which has been posted to arXiv but not yet peer-reviewed.

“Because of these risks, it’s important to predict ahead of time when situational awareness will emerge.”

Before we get to testing when LLMs might acquire that insight, first, a quick recap of how generative AI tools work. Generative AI, and the LLMs they are built on, are named for the way they analyze the associations between billions of words, sentences, and paragraphs to generate fluent streams of text in response to question prompts. Ingesting copious amounts of text, they learn what word is most likely to come next. In their experiments, Berglund and colleagues focused on one component or possible precursor of situation awareness: what they call ‘out-of-context’ reasoning.

“This is the ability to recall facts learned in training and use them at test time, despite these facts not being directly related to the test-time prompt,” Berglund and colleagues explain.

They ran a series of experiments on LLMs of different sizes, finding that for both GPT-3 and LLaMA-1, larger models did better at tasks testing out-of-context reasoning.

“First, we finetune an LLM on a description of a test while providing no examples or demonstrations. At test time, we assess whether the model can pass the test,” Berglund and colleagues write. “To our surprise, we find that LLMs succeed on this out-of-context reasoning task.”

Out-of-context reasoning is, however, a crude measure of situational awareness, which current LLMs are still “some way from acquiring,” says Owain Evans, an AI safety and risk researcher at the University of Oxford. However, some computer scientists have questioned whether the team’s experimental approach is an apt assessment of situational awareness. Evans and colleagues counter by saying their study is just a starting point that could be refined, much like the models themselves.

“These findings offer a foundation for further empirical study, towards predicting and potentially controlling the emergence of situational awareness in LLMs,” the team writes.

Source: Science Alert

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In both the ocean and the atmosphere, these gargantuan waves, called Kelvin waves, always travel eastward. And they fuel oscillating weather patterns such as El Niño, a periodic warming of ocean temperatures that returns every few years.

Geophysicists have leaned on a mathematical explanation for equatorial Kelvin waves since the 1960s, but for some, that explanation wasn’t entirely satisfying. These scientists wanted a more intuitive, physical explanation for the waves’ existence; they wanted to understand the phenomenon in terms of basic principles and to answer questions like: What’s so special about the equator that permits a Kelvin wave to circulate there? And “why the heck does it always travel east?” said Joseph Biello, an applied mathematician at the University of California, Davis.

In 2017, a trio of physicists applied a different type of thinking to the problem. They began by imagining our planet as a quantum system, and they ended up making an unlikely connection between meteorology and quantum physics. As it turns out, Earth’s rotation deflects the flow of fluids in a way that’s analogous to how magnetic fields twist the paths of electrons moving through quantum materials called topological insulators. If you imagine the planet as a giant topological insulator, they said, you can explain the origin of the equatorial Kelvin waves.

But even though the theory worked, it was still only theoretical. No one had directly observationally verified it. Now, in a new preprint, a team of scientists describes the direct measurement of twisting atmospheric waves — the exact kind of evidence needed to bolster the topological theory. The work has already helped scientists to use the language of topology to describe other systems, and it could lead to new insights about waves and weather patterns on Earth.

“This is a direct confirmation of these topological ideas, gleaned from actual observations,” said Brad Marston, a physicist at Brown University and an author of the new paper. “We’re actually living inside of a topological insulator.”

Geoffrey Vallis, an applied mathematician at the University of Exeter in the U.K. who was not involved in the work, said the new result is a significant advance that will provide a “foundational understanding” of Earth’s fluid systems.

THE SHAPE OF WATER

There are two ways to begin this story. The first is all about water, and it starts with William Thomson, also known as Lord Kelvin. In 1879, he noticed that the tides in the English Channel were stronger along the French coastline than on the English side. Thomson realized that this observation could be explained by the Earth’s rotation. As the planet spins, it generates a force, called the Coriolis force, that causes fluids in each hemisphere to swirl in different directions: clockwise in the north, counterclockwise in the south. This phenomenon pushes the water in the English Channel up against the French shoreline, forcing waves to flow along its coast. Now known as coastal Kelvin waves, these waves have since been observed all over the world, flowing clockwise around landmasses (with the coastline on the right side of the wave) in the northern hemisphere and counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere.

But it would be almost a century before scientists discovered the much larger equatorial ripples and connected them to the coastal Kelvin waves.

That happened in 1966, when Taroh Matsuno, a meteorologist, was mathematically modeling the behavior of fluids — both air and water — near Earth’s equator. With his calculations, Matsuno showed that Kelvin waves should also exist at the equator. In the sea, instead of pushing up against a coastline, they would collide with water from the opposite hemisphere, which rotated in the opposite direction. According to Matsuno’s mathematics, the resulting equatorial waves should flow eastward, and they should be enormous — thousands of kilometers long.

Scientists confirmed Matsuno’s predictions in 1968, when they observed the massive equatorial Kelvin waves for the first time. It was “one of the few times that [geophysical fluid] theory predated the discovery,” said George Kiladis, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Kiladis and a colleague later confirmed another of Matsuno’s predictions when they related the length of a Kelvin wave to the frequency of its wiggles — a characteristic known as a dispersion relation — and found that it matched Matsuno’s equations.

So the math worked. The equatorial waves existed, just as predicted. But Matsuno’s equations didn’t explain everything about the waves. And they weren’t enough of an explanation for everyone; just because you can solve an equation doesn’t mean you understand it. “Are you really satisfied with the ‘why’?” Biello said.

TWISTS AND SWIRLS

The why, it turned out, was hiding in the quantum realm — a place geophysicists rarely tread. Likewise, most quantum physicists don’t generally tackle the mysteries of geophysical fluids. But Marston was an exception. He began his career in condensed matter physics, but he was also curious about climate physics and the behavior of fluids in Earth’s oceans and atmosphere. Marston suspected there was a connection between geophysical waves and electrons moving through a magnetic field, but he didn’t know where to find it — until his colleague Antoine Venaille suggested looking at the equator. Marston then noticed that the dispersion relation of the waves along the equator (which Kiladis had measured) looked remarkably similar to the dispersion relation of electrons in a topological insulator. Any condensed matter physicist “would immediately recognize it,” Marston said. “If I had been paying attention to the equatorial regions of the Earth, I would have realized this much sooner.”

And here’s where the story begins for the second time, with the relatively recent discovery of the quantum behavior of electrons in topological insulators.

In 1980, a quantum physicist named Klaus von Klitzing wanted to know how electrons behaved in a magnetic field when they were chilled enough for their quantum nature to become apparent. He already knew that an electron attempting to traverse a magnetic field is deflected from its direction of motion and ends up moving in circles. But he didn’t know how that might change when he introduced the quantum component.

Von Klitzing chilled his electrons almost to absolute zero. As he suspected, at the edge of a material, the electrons only complete half their circle before running into the edge. They then migrate along that boundary, moving in a single direction. Their motion along the boundary creates an edge current. Von Klitzing found that at super-cold temperatures, when the quantum nature of electrons becomes relevant, the edge current is surprisingly robust: It’s immune to variations in the applied magnetic field, disorder in the quantum material, and any other imperfections in the experiment. He had discovered a phenomenon called the quantum Hall effect.

Over the next few years, physicists realized that the edge current’s immunity hinted at a now widely recognized concept in physics. When an object is stretched or squashed — or otherwise deformed without being broken — and its features stay the same, the object is said to be “topologically protected.” For example, if you make a Möbius strip by twisting a strip of paper once and attaching the two ends, the number of twists doesn’t change no matter how the shape is stretched. The only way to modify the twist is to cut the Möbius strip. So the strip’s winding number, 1, is a topologically protected feature.

Back to the experiment. As the electrons in the interior of von Klitzing’s super-chilled material swirled around in the magnetic field, their wave functions (a quantum description of their wavelike nature) twisted into something like a Möbius strip. By some trick of physics, the topological twists in the interior translated into an edge current that flowed without dissipating. In other words, the edge current’s immunity was a topologically protected property created by the twisting interior electrons. Materials like von Klitzing’s super-chilled samples are now referred to as topological insulators, because even though their interiors are insulators, topology allows current to flow around their edges.

When Marston and his colleagues looked at Earth’s equatorial Kelvin waves, they saw a regularity that made them wonder if the waves were analogous to the edge current in a topological insulator.

In 2017, along with Pierre Delplace and Venaille, both physicists at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, Marston observed that the Coriolis force swirls fluids on Earth the way the magnetic field spins von Klitzing’s electrons. In the planetary version of a topological insulator, equatorial Kelvin waves are like the current flowing at a quantum material’s edge. These immense waves propagate around the equator because it is the boundary between two insulators, the hemispheres. And they flow east because in the northern hemisphere, Earth’s rotation swirls fluids clockwise, and in the southern hemisphere, the ocean swirls in the other direction.

“This was the first nontrivial answer anybody provided to why the Kelvin wave should exist,” Biello said. To him, the trio had explained the phenomenon using broad, fundamental principles, rather than simply balancing terms in mathematical equations.

Venaille even thinks the topological description might explain why Earth’s equatorial Kelvin waves seem surprisingly strong, even in the face of turbulence and chaos — our planet’s erratic weather. They stand up to perturbations, he explained, in the same way that the edge current of a topological insulator flows without dissipating and with no regard for impurities in the material.

THE SHAPE OF AIR

Despite the theoretical work, the connection between topological systems and Earth’s equatorial waves was still indirect. Scientists had seen the eastward-flowing waves. But they hadn’t yet seen anything analogous to the swirling interior electrons, which in a quantum system would be the original source of the boundary waves’ robustness. To confirm that on the largest scale, Earth’s fluids behave like electrons in a topological insulator, the team needed to find topologically twisted waves somewhere farther from the equator.

In 2021, Marston set out to find those twisted waves, along with Weixuan Xu, then at Brown University, and their colleagues. To do that, they looked to Earth’s atmosphere, where the Coriolis force stirs pressure waves in the same way it stirs ocean water. For their search, the team targeted a specific type of wave — called a Poincaré-gravity wave — that exists in the stratosphere, a region of the atmosphere about 10 kilometers up. (If their theory was correct, Marston said, these twisted topological waves should exist throughout the atmosphere and on the ocean’s surface. It’s just that they had the best chance of actually finding them in the relatively calm milieu of the stratosphere.)

They started by combing through the ERA5 data set from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which takes atmospheric data from satellites, ground-based sensors and weather balloons and combines it with meteorological models. The team identified the Poincaré-gravity waves in those data sets. They then compared the height of the waves to the velocity of their horizontal motion. When they calculated the offset between those undulations — referred to as the phase between wave oscillations — the scientists saw that the ratio was not always the same. It depended on the exact length of the wave. When they plotted the phase in an abstract “wave vector space” — something that’s done in quantum physics all the time, but not often in earth science — they saw that the phase spiraled around and formed a vortex: The twisting in the waves’ phases resembled the spiraling wave functions in a topological insulator. Although a bit abstracted, it was the hallmark they had been searching for. “We actually proved the theory to be true,” Xu said.

Kiladis, who was not part of the study team, said that these waves had never been analyzed in such a way before and called the study “a major breakthrough.” “My sense is that it will provide a different perspective on atmospheric waves that will likely lead to new insights,” he wrote in an email. “We need all the help we can get!”

A TOPOLOGICAL PLANET

These recent studies have opened the door for scientists to study topology in a whole host of other fluids. Previously, these materials had been out of bounds because they didn’t share a key feature with quantum materials: a periodic arrangement of atoms. “I was surprised to see that topology could be defined in fluid systems without periodic order,” said Anton Souslov, a theoretical physicist at the University of Bath in the U.K. Inspired by the 2017 paper, Souslov helped develop other tools that could be used to study topology in fluids.

Now, other scientists are looking for connections between the movements of particles at the smallest scale and the motions of fluids on planetary — or even larger — scales. Researchers are studying topology in fluids from magnetized plasmas to collections of self-propelled particles; Delplace and Venaille are wondering whether the dynamics of stellar plasma might also resemble a topological insulator. And while such insights might someday help geophysicists better predict the emergence of large-scale weather patterns on Earth, the work is already contributing to a better understanding of the role topology plays in a wide array of systems.

Last December, David Tong, a quantum theorist at the University of Cambridge, looked at the same fluid equations that Thomson had used. But this time, he considered them from a topological perspective. Tong ended up connecting the fluids on Earth to the quantum Hall effect again, but through a different approach, using the language of quantum field theory. When he tweaked the variables in the fluid flow equations, he found that those equations were equivalent to Maxwell-Chern-Simons theory, which describes how electrons move in a magnetic field. In this new view of Earth’s flow, a wave’s height corresponds to a magnetic field and its speed corresponds to an electric field. From his work, Tong was able to explain the existence of the coastal Kelvin waves that Thomson originally discovered.

Together, the ideas highlight the ubiquity of topology in our physical world, from condensed matter to the fluids flowing on Earth. “Having these kinds of parallel approaches is a great thing,” Marston said.

It’s still unclear whether, in the biggest picture, treating Earth as a topological insulator will unlock the mysteries of large-scale weather patterns, or maybe even lead to new geophysical discoveries. For now, it’s a simple reinterpretation of terrestrial phenomena. But decades ago, applying topology to condensed matter was also a reinterpretation of phenomena; von Klitzing discovered the resilience of the edge current in a quantum material, but he had no idea it had anything to do with topology. Later, other physicists reinterpreted his discovery as having a topological explanation, which ended up revealing a host of new quantum phenomena and phases of matter.

Source: Scientific American

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Mitotane inhibits cell division in the adrenal cortex and thus counteracts tumor growth. The risk of the disease coming back after surgery was three times higher in the control study group that did not receive mitotane than in the mitotane group. And the risk of dying from the disease was almost halved by the therapy. The Italia-German team had set new standards in the treatment of the very rare but extremely aggressive tumor.

“Our findings from 2007 still apply, but only to patients with normal or high risk of recurrence,” explains Prof. Dr. Fassnacht, chair of the Department of Endocrinology and Diabetology at Würzburg University Hospital.

In a new clinical study published in August 2023 in the journal The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, he and Terzolo and other collaborators found that the adjuvant treatment with mitotane is not necessary if the patients fulfill three factors. First: The operation was a complete, so-called R0 resection. Second: The tumor stage was low and there had not yet been any spread. Third: The cell proliferation marker Ki-67 is below 10%, meaning the risk of recurrence is low.

ADIUVO shows no improvement with low risk of recurrence

ADIUVO is the first ever randomized trial worldwide of adjuvant treatment for adrenocortical carcinoma. A total of 91 patients in 23 centers in seven countries were randomized to either receive oral mitotane for two years or to be monitored “only” by imaging and laboratory controls after surgical removal of their adrenocortical carcinoma and low to intermediate risk of recurrence (R0 resection, stage I-III, Ki67 ≤10%). The efficacy of mitotane versus surveillance only was assessed by recurrence-free survival (RFS).

The 5-year RFS rate was 79% in the mitotane group and 75% in the surveillance group. The 5-year overall survival rate was not statistically significantly different. However, all study participants who received mitotane experienced adverse events, and eight people discontinued treatment. Mitotane treatment can be associated with nausea, diarrhea, dizziness and even speech problems. Patients who did not want to be randomized were followed up in a prospective follow-up study. These were 95 people, of whom 42 were followed up with mitotane and 53 without. In this parallel study, the result of the randomized study was confirmed.

Prognosis scheme based on tumor stage, resection status and Ki-67 assessment
Fassnacht states, “Concomitant therapy with mitotane is not indicated in patients with low-grade, localized adrenocortical carcinoma in which the tumor has not yet metastasized and could be completely removed, as their prognoses are relatively good and treatment with mitotane does not show a statistically significant improvement in the relapse rate, but is associated with side effects.”

In other words, “our study is a first step towards personalized medicine in this rare disease. It shows that it is possible, with a simple and widely available prognostic scheme based on tumor stage, resection status and Ki-67 assessment, to identify a subgroup of patients whose prognosis is much better than expected and for whom active surveillance is the most appropriate approach.”

Endocrinology at Würzburg University Hospital is considered an international reference center for the diagnosis, treatment and research of adrenocortical carcinoma and is currently the largest center worldwide. The usually highly malignant tumor of this endocrine gland, which sit in pairs on the kidneys, has been the focus of Würzburg endocrinology for more than 20 years.

The European Adrenal Tumor Network ENSAT and the German Adrenal Carcinoma Study Group are coordinated from here. “With our numerous basic research, translational and clinical studies, we in Würzburg, together with a large interdisciplinary team, have made a significant contribution to improving the worldwide diagnosis and treatment of patients with adrenal carcinoma,” Fassnacht says.

Even the diagnosis is difficult, because adrenal carcinoma is very rare and initially causes no symptoms. Therefore, it is often only discovered at an advanced stage. In Germany, it is estimated that there are about 80 to 120 new cases every year. Depending on the type of tumor, surgery can be performed, and in the advanced stage, chemotherapy or radiotherapy are also necessary.

Until now, it was common practice to treat all patients with additional medication after surgery, regardless of the stage of the tumor. Currently, mitotane is the only approved drug for adrenal carcinoma. Clinical studies on other drugs and therapies are underway at the University Hospital of Würzburg.

Source: Medical Press

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However, most microbes in the environment are not friendly, so a functioning immune system may have played a key role in enabling plants to establish themselves on dry land.

The team around Hirofumi Nakagami, have discovered that the first line of immunity deployed by many flowering plants and their relatives is also found in the second main grouping of land plants, which includes mosses, liverworts and hornworts.

Their findings suggest that this branch of plant immunity evolved early during terrestrial evolution and may have been important for plant adaptation to land. Their findings are now published in the journal Current Biology.

The last common ancestor of land plants emerged some 500 million years ago, after which land plants split into lineages with a vasculature and those without. Vascular plants can engage in more efficient water and nutrient transport via their vascular tissues and have traditionally received more attention from scientists and plant breeders as they include all flowering plants and crop species.

However, studies of their non-vascular cousins can provide significant insights into plant evolution, such as when certain traits and capabilities evolved and how widely traits are shared in general among extant land plants. Thus, a better understanding of non-vascular plants could be harnessed to improve breeding strategies.

Nakagami and his team, together with scientists from Japan and Spain, study Marchantia polymorpha (Marchantia), a species of liverwort from the non-vascular plants. Many land plants have undergone extensive genome duplication, which can make teasing out gene function tricky, but Marchantia often has only one copy of each gene meaning that it is easier to discover what different genes do.

The researchers set out to determine whether the first line of plant defense, known as pattern-triggered immunity (PTI) was conserved also in Marchantia. PTI is mediated by receptors at the cell surface that sense invading organisms through characteristic motifs or patterns and translate this perception into activation of defense genes and other characteristic responses.

The scientists first confirmed that these responses where indeed present in Marchantia by challenging them with substances known to activate PTI. Analysis of the genome of the liverwort revealed the presence of PTI receptors, and when two of these were disrupted, Marchantia lost the ability to mount the defense responses.

The presence of PTI in non-vascular plants suggests that PTI was already present in the last common ancestor of all land plants and thus very early after terrestrialization. It further implies that this arm of immunity may have been important for allowing plants to colonize and survive on dry land. It also suggests that all vascular plants share this capability, meaning that strategies aimed at bolstering PTI, through for example gene transfer, could be widely effective across all plants, including crops.

Nakagami is now interested in determining when exactly PTI evolved in ancient plants. “It is fascinating to learn how plants may have adapted to rather stressful terrestrial environments before going on to transform the Earth’s land surface and ultimately benefitting our lives. Understanding the origin and evolution of the plant immune system can give us novel ideas for developing universal plant protection technologies,” Nakagami said.

Source: PHYS.ORG

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I’m not exaggerating when I say if we don’t stop this rampant approval of fossil fuel projects, by 2073 we’ll be living through the large-scale destruction of ecosystems and will have breached multiple tipping points, leading to the collapse of our food systems and hellish heat and fires.

This is just one of four major fossil fuel approvals that’s been greenlit under the Albanese government. And it’s a terrible illustration of just how broken Australia’s environment law is. Like all the others, this approval was granted under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC).

This law, astonishingly, fails to deal directly with the main threat Australia’s environment now faces: climate change. There are at least 21 more fossil fuel projects currently in the EPBC approval pipeline, and dozens more proposals that have been announced, but not yet lodged for assessment.

The Albanese government promised before the last election that it would strengthen our national environment law. But it’s now languishing on its to-do list. Australia, our magnificent country, with its lush rainforests, vibrant coral reefs and awe-inspiring landscapes, is also the world’s first nation to lose a species to the climate crisis.

The Bramble Cay melomys, a cute mouse-like creature native to an island in the Great Barrier Reef, was officially declared extinct in 2019. Its fate stands as a stark reminder: every day is Threatened Species Day until we stop burning fossil fuels.

Sadly, it will not be the last species we lose to climate change. Why? Because the EPBC has a glaring blind spot when it comes to climate change. It represents a total failure to protect the essentials of our Australian way of life that sustain us all: clean air, water, wildlife and ecosystems.

We urgently need a robust law that safeguards not only our natural wonders but our health and economy too. A law that says a resounding “yes” to responsible, clean energy and industry projects and an unambiguous “no” to ventures that exacerbate the climate crisis. The Environment Council of Central Queensland is gearing up for a fight to set this precedent, challenging the government’s reckless coal mining decisions in court.

The decisions this group are fighting to overturn include the MACH Energy’s Mount Pleasant Optimisation Project, a thermal coalmine expansion, and Whitehaven’s Underground Mine Stage 3 Extension Project, another expanded thermal coalmine in Narrabri, which will – between them – produce close to 1.5bn tonnes of CO2e, almost triple all of Australia’s annual emissions last year.

Blaming the rubber stamping of these planet-killing shockers on a clunky old law just isn’t good enough. Simply saying one’s hands are tied because this project is compliant with the law while glossing over the power one has to change that very law – today – is not leadership.

Let’s get real: our national environment law is a relic from the Howard-era. It’s now more than 23 years old. We now know a tremendous amount more about the dire consequences of climate change on species and ecosystems than we did in 1999.

Indeed we’re now living through the age of climate consequences and the anxiety of what an extremely challenging El Niño could bring. With every coal and gas project approved, we’re not just losing species. We’re losing our Australian identity and the natural legacy we owe our children.

The call to action is clear and urgent. There is absolutely no place for new and expanded fossil fuel projects. The Albanese government now has a crucial opportunity to show leadership and strengthen our national environment law to ensure each and every project is assessed for its climate impacts.

If we don’t get this right, we’re not just making every day Threatened Species Day, we’re headed towards a toxic, sad, future, with damage and destruction that cannot be unwound. There are no second chances or take backs, it’s now or never.

The post Our Environmental Laws Are Failing Us in The Face of The Climate Crisis appeared first on The Victoria Post.

Before you say “ewww,” you should know that these tiny creatures, which on Earth number more than stars in the universe, connect all life on our planet. Scientists have found them deep in ocean chasms, and in volcanic vents, glaciers, caves and mines. They provide most of the oxygen in the atmosphere and help organisms digest food and manage immune systems. When creatures—including people—die, microbes decompose them, releasing carbon, nitrogen and phosphates that create new life. Roughly 38 trillion bacteria live inside and on you right now. Without bacteria and all that they do, you wouldn’t stay alive very long.

Nor will humans fare well on a planet where our indiscriminate use of fossil fuels and industrial chemicals continues to alter the delicate balance of microbes that sustain our ecosystem, into one that does not. Billions of years of evolution have shifted the Earth from a carbon-rich atmosphere to one drenched in oxygen. Over those eons, microbes mostly accomplished this terraforming by feeding on carbon and producing the oxygen we breathe as a byproduct, a process that humans seem hell-bent on reversing unless we act quickly to preserve the world of the very small by radically reducing carbon emissions and the indiscriminate use of other chemicals.

Humans are subjecting the Earth’s microbiome to the equivalent of what happens when you eat fast-food burgers and potato chips 24/7. You get a bellyache, or worse, in part because processed foods and high fructose corn syrup alter the composition of bacteria in our gut, decreasing the influence of “good” bacteria and increasing “bad” bacteria. Likewise, carbon and other pollutants alter the microbiome of Earth and undermine planetwide ecological systems that most people are only vaguely aware of.

For example, tiny ocean microbes called phytoplankton not only produce much of the oxygen on Earth, but also sequester almost 30 percent of the carbon produced by humans each year. Called the marine biological carbon pump, or just the biological pump, the system that supports phytoplankton is increasingly under threat as sea temperatures rise and phytoplankton drown in carbon. “We’re lucky we have the oceans to sponge up so much CO2,” says Chris Dupont, an oceanographer and microbiologist at the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, Calif. “If the pump that drives this ever stopped working, we’d be in big trouble.”

Rising levels of CO2 make seawater more acidic. This harms microbes sensitive to changes in pH. Pollution from phosphates and nitrogen from fertilizers on land are flowing from rivers into oceans and causing dead zones where the water is hypoxic, containing less than two parts per million of oxygen, an environment where few (or no) fish, or other marine life can survive. A dead zone below the mouth of the Mississippi River in the Gulf of Mexico has reached the size of New Jersey and, while it fluctuates in size according to the season and from year to year, overall it has been growing bigger. Globally, the number of dead zones has doubled every decade since the 1960s and now number in the hundreds, occurring from the Baltic Sea to the coasts of Latin America and Africa and the Great Lakes. The largest dead zone in the world is a 63,700-square-mile swath of the Gulf of Oman, almost the size of Florida.

Warming oceans and out-of-control chemical use cause coral reefs to eject bacteria and tiny algae called zooxanthellae that live in their tissue and provide them with important nutrients. Zooxanthellae help remove waste and fend off pathogens and are responsible for coral’s vibrant colors. Their loss contributes to reef’s dying, bleached white. More heat in the North Atlantic also spurs rising levels of a toxic bacteria species called Vibrio, which causes intestinal illnesses, including cholera, in humans, according to a 2016 study. Vibrio vulnificus, the so-called flesh-eating bacteria, and Karenia brevis, a toxic algae species that can kill fish and cause respiratory and other problems in manatees, sea turtles and humans, are among other nasty pathogens on the rise along parts of the North Atlantic coast. These microbes are often associated with “red tides” that are increasingly inundating the coasts of Florida and other shores as algae thrive in warmer waters and gorge on nutrients in fertilizer runoff.

Scientists can only guess what hot-tub level temperatures off Florida are doing to microbes living there. “One-hundred-degree Fahrenheit water will obviously change the microbiome, but in truth we do not know the ramifications,” marine biologist Jack Gilbert of the University of California, San Diego, told me. “Microbes are highly adaptable, but as these changes become more routine, we will see a shift in community dynamics and their metabolic activity that could have ramifications throughout the food chain.”

As the world moves to limit human activity contributing to climate change, it’s critical that the effect on Earth’s smallest creatures be considered alongside concerns for more photo-friendly species like Adélie penguins, wild tulips, piper plovers—and the aforementioned parrotfish and spiny lobsters. That’s a point made in a new book, The Voyage of the Sorcerer II: Explorations into the Microbiome of the Oceans, which I co-authored with geneticist Craig Venter. The book describes his two decades of work scouring the world’s oceans for microbes from a 100-foot sailboat.

“It’s hard to get the attention of politicians and others about what’s happening,” says Dupont. But scientists are trying. For instance, in 2019, a group of 34 microbiologists published a paper titled “Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: Microorganisms and Climate Change.” The authors put “humanity on notice that the impact of climate change will depend heavily on responses of microorganisms, which are essential for achieving an environmentally sustainable future.”

As we think small about climate change it becomes clear that nature is responding to the ongoing chemical assault by “striking back in unexpected ways”—a warning delivered in 1962 when marine biologist Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring. Six decades later we’re seeing what she meant with superhot oceans, heat domes, raging fires, floods, crop losses and superstorms. Now we can add that nature is striking back through Earth’s smallest creatures, as humanity shifts the microscopic life that sustains us to a planet that, more and more, does not.

Source: Scientific American

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Eyewitnesses in the foothills of the mountains said some towns are completely destroyed, with almost all the homes in an area of the village of Asni damaged. The scale of the quake’s impact is still becoming clear, but eyewitnesses CNN spoke to gave a sense of the destruction, especially in isolated villages that have been most badly hit.

Soumia Sandoval, based in Los Angeles, California, told CNN she learned from family friends that their village at the base of the mountains was flattened by the quake. Mustapha Louaanabi, who also lives in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, described the moment the earthquake struck, saying there were “loud, deafening noises” and it felt as if “a train was passing right in the middle of the living room.”

More than 400 meanwhile perished in the southwestern Moroccan city of Taroudant. And more than 300,000 people have been affected in Marrakech and surrounding areas, according to the WHO. Historic sites have been damaged there; a small mosque at the heart of the Marrakech Medina in the city’s historical quarter almost entire collapsed.

The Marrakech Medina, a UNESCO World Heritage site, was hit by the quake. The Medina district dates back centuries and is enclosed by walls built of red sandstone. Many of the old buildings inside the Medina have been damaged and some have collapsed entirely. Outside the city, images showed the 12th century Tinmal Mosque in the High Atlas mountains had been badly damaged.

What’s happening on the ground?

Emergency workers were deployed to affected regions, despite some roads being damaged or blocked by debris. Some remote villages on the foothills of the mountain have been hard to access. Mohammed, 50, from the town of Ouirgane, lost four family members in the quake. “I managed to get out safely with my two children but lost the rest. My house is gone.” he said.

Rescue operations are still ongoing. “We are out in the streets with authorities as they try to pull the dead from the rubble. Many many people were transported to hospital in front of me. We are hoping for miracles from the rubble” he said. But destroyed roads to villages are making it hard to get aid into some of the hardest-hit regions, a Moroccan government official told CNN.

“The rescue efforts are ongoing to reach the difficult areas. The earthquake struck mountainous areas that are scattered geographically and it’s difficult to reach these areas in some cases,” the official told CNN. Authorities are using helicopters to reach the worst-hit areas and machinery to remove the rubble from the impassable roads, the official said.

Inside and outside Marrakech, many residents have spent two nights on the streets, afraid to return to their homes. In the hard-hit central village of Moulay Brahim, south of Marrakech in the Atlas Mountains, CNN found a family living in a makeshift camp on a soccer field, with authorities telling them it could be a week before they can go home. Firefighters are leading rescue efforts but some buildings are too dangerous to enter. Morocco’s government said it had activated all available resources to tackle the quake and urged people to “avoid panic.”

King Mohammed VI of Morocco ordered that a relief commission be set up to distribute aid to survivors, including orphans and people who lost their homes in the disaster. He also declared three days of national mourning and ordered mosques nationwide to hold funeral prayers, known as “Janazah” prayers, at noon on Sunday for those killed.

What’s the international reaction been?

Many world leaders have expressed their commiserations, as well as offered support to Morocco. France has activated emergency aid from local government funds to help with humanitarian operations in quake-affected regions, and will give 5 million euros ($5.3M) to non-governmental organizations operating in Morocco to aid rescure efforts, the government said Monday.

A Spanish search and rescue team, made up of 56 soldiers and four dogs, landed in Marrakech to help in the quake’s aftermath, according to Spain’s defense ministry. Turkey, which was hit by a devastating earthquake that killed tens of thousands earlier this year, said it was ready to send 265 personnel and 1,000 tents to Morocco to support aid efforts.

Britain said it has deployed 60 search and rescue specialists, including four search dogs, rescue equipment and a medical assessment team to Morocco. Algeria, which severed diplomatic ties with Morocco in 2021 and closed its airspace to all planes registered in Morocco, said it would reopen its airspace for humanitarian aid and medical flights going to and from the Arab nation.

Meanwhile, the Red Cross Society of China said Monday it will send $200,000 in emergency humanitarian cash assistance to the Moroccan Red Crescent to support rescue and relief work. The United Nations and US President Joe Biden have also said they are ready to provide assistance, and the World Bank has said it has offered the country its “full support.”

Source: CNN World

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“As cameras zoomed in, scientists were stumped as to its identification, with initial thoughts ranging from a dead sponge attachment to coral, to an egg casing,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a statement.

”Invoking almost fairytale-like imagery, the specimen has since been dubbed a ‘golden orb’ and even a ‘golden egg,” the agency added.

It remains unclear if the golden dome is associated with a known species, a new species, or represents an unknown life stage of an existing one, according to Sam Candio, an NOAA Ocean Exploration coordinator.

”While we were able to collect the ‘golden orb’ and bring it onto the ship, we still are not able to identify it beyond the fact that it is biological in origin,” said Mr Candio.

He further explained that they plan to investigate more about the shiny object in a laboratory setting using the ”collective expertise of the scientific community” and ”more sophisticated tools”.

”While somewhat humbling to be stumped by this finding, it serves as a reminder of how little we know about our own planet and how much is left to learn and appreciate about our ocean”, he added.

NOAA is currently on a five-month mission to explore the depths of the sea near Alaska.

Source: NDT World

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