A rustic camp in northeast Greenland was one of the bases for deploying autonomous measuring devices with modern radar technology by helicopter in a part of the 79° N-Glacier that is difficult to access. Measurement flights with the polar aircraft of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and satellite data were also incorporated into a scientific study that has now been published in the scientific journal The Cryosphere. This study examines how global warming affects the stability of a floating ice tongue. This is of great importance for the remaining ice shelves in Greenland as well as those in Antarctica, as instability of the ice shelf usually results in an acceleration of the ice flow, which would lead to a greater sea level rise.

“Since 2016, we have been using autonomous instruments to carry out radar measurements on the 79° N-Glacier, from which we can determine melt and thinning rates,” says AWI glaciologist Dr Ole Zeising, the first author of the publication. “In addition, we used aircraft radar data from 1998, 2018 and 2021 showing changes in ice thickness. We were able to measure that the 79° N-Glacier has changed significantly in recent decades under the influence of global warming.”

The study shows how the combination of a warm ocean inflow and a warming atmosphere affects the floating ice tongue of the 79° N-Glacier in northeast Greenland. Only recently, an AWI oceanography team published a modelling study on this subject. The unique data set of observations now presented shows that extremely high melt rates occur over a large area near the transition to the ice sheet. In addition, large channels form on the underside of the ice from the land side, probably because the water from huge lakes drains through the glacier ice. Both processes have led to a strong thinning of the glacier in recent decades.

Due to extreme melt rates, the ice of the floating glacier tongue has become 32 % thinner since 1998, especially from the grounding line where the ice comes into contact with the ocean. In addition, a 500-metre-high channel has formed on the underside of the ice, which spreads towards the inland. The researchers attribute these changes to warm ocean currents in the cavity below the floating tongue and to the runoff of surface meltwater as a result of atmospheric warming. A surprising finding was that melt rates have decreased since 2018. A possible cause for this is a colder ocean inflow. “The fact that this system reacts on such short time scales is astonishing for systems that are actually inert such as glaciers,” says Prof Dr Angelika Humbert, who is also involved in the study.

“We expect that this floating glacier tongue will break apart over the next few years to decades,” explains the AWI glaciologist. “We have begun to study this process in detail to gain maximum insight into the course of the process. Although there have been several such disintegrations of ice shelves, we have only been able to collect data subsequently. As a scientific community, we are now in a better position by having built up a really good database before the collapse.”

A breakthrough study has discovered a group of biological markers that are found in high levels among infectious patients.

The researchers hope the findings will pave the way for a simple test that can diagnose and stop the spread of the estimated 10 million cases annually.

Tuberculosis, or TB, is the world’s deadliest infectious disease and kills more than one million people each year, according to World Health Organisation data.

Scientists from the University of Southampton, working with experts worldwide, carried out the most detailed analysis ever undertaken of blood markers for the bacterial infection.

The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation Insight, used a novel technique that identified a set of six proteins that are highly accurate in pinpointing TB.

Lead author Dr Hannah Schiff, a respiratory expert at Southampton, said as many as three million cases were missed last year, mostly in developing countries.

She added: “TB remains a global catastrophe because our efforts to control the spread are hindered by inadequate testing, which is slow and reliant on specialist equipment and labs.

“A third of people who get infected go undiagnosed and remain infectious.

“In our study, we combined a new measurement technique with deep mathematical analysis to identify these six new markers of TB disease.

“It could lead to a transformative alternative to diagnosing the condition — a simple test that detects proteins in the bloodstream whose levels differ between people with TB, healthy individuals, and those suffering from other respiratory illnesses.”

TB spreads through inhaling tiny droplets from coughs or sneezes of infected people — and, while it mostly affects the lungs, it can devastate any part of the body.

Cases in the UK increased to around 5,000 last year, and are expected to continue rising in 2024, according to the UK Health Security Agency.

The University of Southampton study was undertaken with experts from the University of Cape Town in South Africa and Cayetano Heredia University in Lima, Peru.

It was published for world TB day, on 24 March, which is held to raise awareness and to step up efforts to end the global Tuberculosis pandemic.

The study was funded by the UK Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Southampton Biomedical Research Centre.

Academics leading the investigation studied proteins found in the blood of people with active TB in Africa and South America.

They compared the biomarkers to those found in healthy people and patients with lung infections, identifying 118 proteins that differed significantly between the groups.

The experts then narrowed these down to the six proteins that, they said, can be used to distinguish contagious patients with TB from people in good health or with lung conditions.

The findings are a roadmap to developing a TB test that is as simple as the lateral flows used during Covid, said study co-director Dr Diana Garay-Baquero, also from Southampton.

She added: “The new markers we discovered are truly exciting, but the important work now is to develop these into tests that can be used for the millions of people who are transmitting TB without knowing it.

“As the Covid-19 pandemic confirmed, we ignore highly infectious airborne diseases at our peril.”

This study was led by Kristina Petersen, associate professor of nutritional sciences, and Penny Kris-Etherton, retired Evan Pugh University Professor of Nutritional Sciences, and recently published in the journal Current Developments in Nutrition. The researchers examined how a food-based intervention — one avocado per day — impacts overall diet quality.

“Avocados are a nutrient-dense food, containing a lot of fiber and other important nutrients. We wanted to see if regular intake of this food would lead to an increase in diet quality,” Petersen said. “Previous observational research suggests avocado consumers have higher diet quality than non-consumers. So, we developed this study to determine if there is a causational link between avocado consumption and overall diet quality.”

Petersen stated that because only 2% of American adults are regular avocado consumers, the researchers wanted to determine if including avocados in an individual’s daily diet could significantly increase their diet quality.

Researchers conducted phone interviews with participants before the study began and at a few points throughout to determine what their dietary intake was like in the previous 24 hours and evaluated their diets using the Healthy Eating Index to determine how well they adhered to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Adherence to the guidelines was used as a measure of overall diet quality.

The study consisted of 1,008 participants who were split into two groups. One group continued their usual diet and limited their avocado intake during the 26-week study, while the other group incorporated one avocado per day into their diet.

“We found that the participants who had an avocado per day significantly increased their adherence to dietary guidelines,” Petersen said. “This suggests that strategies, like eating one avocado per day, can help people follow dietary guidelines and improve the quality of their diets.”

Although researchers said they were not surprised to see that eating avocados daily improved diet quality, they had not predicted how participants were able to achieve it.

“We determined that participants were using avocados as a substitute for some foods higher in refined grains and sodium,” Petersen said. “In our study, we classified avocados as a vegetable and did see an increase in vegetable consumption attributed to the avocado intake, but also participants used the avocados to replace some unhealthier options.”

According to Petersen, having poor diet quality substantially increases the risk for conditions like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, kidney disease and many other preventable diseases.

“By improving people’s adherence to dietary guidelines, we can help to reduce their risk of developing these chronic conditions and prolong healthy life expectancy,” Petersen said.

Petersen has also conducted similar studies investigating the impact of food-based interventions, including the relationship between pistachios and diet quality, but said that more research is needed to determine what other food-based strategies can be used to improve people’s adherence to dietary guidelines.

“In studies like this one, we are able to determine food-based ways to improve diet quality, but behavioral strategies are also needed to help people adhere to dietary guidelines and reduce their risk of chronic disease,” Petersen said.

Other contributors to the study include Sydney Smith and David M. Reboussin, Wake Forest University School of Medicine; Alice H. Lichtenstein and Nirupa R. Matthan, Tufts University; Zhaoping Li, David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles; and Joan Sabate, Sujatha Rajaram and Gina Segovia-Siapco, Loma Linda University.

The Avocado Nutrition Center supported this study. The funder did not influence the data analysis, data interpretation or writing of the published study.

In an overview of the protein and the inhibitors published today in the journal Cell Reports, the CU researchers discussed the best ways to use the interventions.

The protein, CaMKII, is ubiquitous in cells throughout the body but is perhaps best known for its prominent role in the brain and the heart. It is critical in learning and memory but if misregulated can cause problems.

“The most powerful engine to drive new discoveries on CaMKII functions may lie in the availability of three distinct classes of pharmacological inhibitors,” said the manuscript’s senior author Ulli Bayer, PhD, professor of pharmacology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “These inhibitors now allow a detailed first assessment of CaMKII functions in any given system in a way that is readily accessible to a broad range of scientists without specialized interest in CaMKII research.”

Carolyn Nicole Brown, a graduate student working in Bayer’s laboratory, co-authored the manuscript.

The drugs now allow a detailed first assessment of CaMKII functions in any given system that’s accessible to a wide range of scientists.

Previous studies by Bayer’s lab revealed that inhibiting CaMKII activity protects against some of the effects of amyloid-beta (Abeta) plaques in the brain, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease (AD).

The researchers found one group of inhibitors, or drugs, that protected from the Abeta effects without detrimental side effects, making it potentially useful in treating a number of brain diseases.

Yet CaMKII is present in nearly every other cell. The review offers insights into the protein for those who don’t study it fulltime, providing tools to fill in the gaps in knowledge about how the protein functions.

“We are experts in studying this complex protein and here we provide a guideline for non-specialists to use these new tools,” Bayer said. “We are trying to make it easier for everyone.”

Brown, the co-author, agreed.

“The most important advances will be filling the gaps that we don’t even know about yet,” she said.

The team discovered tiny microplastic particles in deposits located more than seven metres deep, in samples dating back to the first or early second century and excavated in the late 1980s.

Preserving archaeology in situ has been the preferred approach to managing historical sites for a generation. However, the research team say the findings could prompt a rethink, with the tiny particles potentially compromising the preserved remains.

Microplastics are small plastic particles, ranging from 1μm (one thousandth of a millimetre) to 5mm. They come from a wide range of sources, from larger plastic pieces that have broken apart, or resin pellets used in plastic manufacturing which were frequently used in beauty products up until around 2020.

The study, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, was carried out by the universities of York and Hull and supported by the educational charity York Archaeology.

Professor John Schofield from the University of York’s Department of Archaeology, said: “This feels like an important moment, confirming what we should have expected: that what were previously thought to be pristine archaeological deposits, ripe for investigation, are in fact contaminated with plastics, and that this includes deposits sampled and stored in the late 1980s.

“We are familiar with plastics in the oceans and in rivers. But here we see our historic heritage incorporating toxic elements. To what extent this contamination compromises the evidential value of these deposits, and their national importance is what we’ll try to find out next.”

David Jennings, chief executive of York Archaeology, added: “We think of microplastics as a very modern phenomenon, as we have only really been hearing about them for the last 20 years, when Professor Richard Thompson revealed in 2004 that they have been prevalent in our seas since the 1960s with the post-war boom in plastic production,”

“This new study shows that the particles have infiltrated archaeological deposits, and like the oceans, this is likely to have been happening for a similar period, with particles found in soil samples taken and archived in 1988 at Wellington Row in York.”

The study identified 16 different microplastic polymer types across both contemporary and archived samples.

“Where this becomes a concern for archaeology is how microplastics may compromise the scientific value of archaeological deposits. Our best-preserved remains — for example, the Viking finds at Coppergate — were in a consistent anaerobic waterlogged environment for over 1000 years, which preserved organic materials incredibly well. The presence of microplastics can and will change the chemistry of the soil, potentially introducing elements which will cause the organic remains to decay. If that is the case, preserving archaeology in situ may no longer be appropriate,” added David Jennings.

The research team say further research into the impact of microplastics will be a priority for archaeologists, given the potential impact of these human-made chemicals on archaeological deposits.

The early history of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of joining smaller galaxies, which makes for fairly large building blocks. Now, Khyati Malhan and Hans-Walter Rix of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy have succeeded in identifying what could be two of the earliest building blocks that can still be recognized as such today: proto-galactic fragments that merged with an early version of our Milky Way between 12 and 13 billion years ago, at the very beginning of the era of galaxy formation in the Universe. The components, which the astronomers have named Shakti and Shiva, were identified by combining data from ESA’s astrometry satellite Gaia with data from the SDSS survey. For astronomers, the result is the equivalent of finding traces of an initial settlement that grew into a large present-day city.

Tracing the origins of stars that came from other galaxies

When galaxies collide and merge, several processes happen in parallel. Each galaxy carries along its own reservoir of hydrogen gas. Upon collision, those hydrogen gas clouds are destabilized, and numerous new stars are formed inside. Of course, the incoming galaxies also already have their own stars, and in a merger, stars from the galaxies will mingle. In the long run, such “accreted stars” will also account for some of the stellar population of the newly-formed combined galaxy. Once the merger is completed, it might seem hopeless to identify which stars came from which predecessor galaxy. But in fact, at least some ways of tracing back stellar ancestry exist.

Help comes from basic physics. When galaxies collide and their stellar populations mingle, most of the stars retain very basic properties, which are directly linked to the speed and direction of the galaxy in which they originated. Stars from the same pre-merger galaxy share similar values for both their energy and what physicists call angular momentum — the momentum associated with orbital motion or rotation. For stars moving in a galaxy’s gravitational field, both energy and angular momentum are conserved: they remain the same over time. Look for large groups of stars with similar, unusual values for energy and angular momentum — and chances are, you might find a merger remnant.

Additional pointers can assist identification. Stars that formed more recently contain more heavier elements, what astronomers call “metals,” than stars that formed a long time ago. The lower the metal content (“metallicity”), the earlier the star presumably formed. When trying to identify stars that already existed 13 billion years ago, one should look for stars with very low metal content (“metal-poor”).

Virtual excavations in a large data set

Identifying the stars that joined our Milky Way as parts of another galaxy has only become possible comparatively recently. It requires large, high-quality data sets, and the analysis involves sifting the data in clever ways so as to identify the searched-for class of objects. This kind of data set has only been available for a few years. The ESA astrometry satellite Gaia provides an ideal data set for this kind of big-data galactic archeology. Launched in 2013, it has produced an increasingly accurate data set over the past decade, which by now includes positions, changes in position and distances for almost 1.5 billion stars within our galaxy.

Gaia data revolutionized studies of the dynamics of stars in our home galaxy, and has already led to the discovery of previously unknown substructures. This includes the so-called Gaia Enceladus/Sausage stream, a remnant of the most recent larger merger our home galaxy has undergone, between 8 and 11 billion years ago. It also includes two structures identified in 2022: the Pontus stream identified by Malhan and colleagues and the “poor old heart” of the Milky Way identified by Rix and colleagues. The latter is a population of stars that newly formed during the initial mergers that created the proto-Milky Way, and continue to reside in our galaxy’s central region.

Traces of Shakti and Shiva

For their present search, Malhan and Rix used Gaia data combined with detailed stellar spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (DR17). The latter provide detailed information about the stars’ chemical composition. Malhan says: “We observed that, for a certain range of metal-poor stars, stars were crowded around two specific combinations of energy and angular momentum.”

In contrast with the “poor old heart,” which was also visible in those plots, the two groups of like-minded stars had comparatively large angular momentum, consistent with groups of stars that had been part of separate galaxies which had merged with the Milky Way. Malhan has named these two structures Shakti and Shiva, the latter one of the principal deities of Hinduism and the former a female cosmic force often portrayed as Shiva’s consort.

Their energy and angular momentum values, plus their overall low metallicity on par with that of the “poor old heart,” makes Shakti and Shiva good candidates for some of the earliest ancestors of our Milky Way. Rix says: “Shakti and Shiva might be the first two additions to the ‘poor old heart’ of our Milky Way, initiating its growth towards a large galaxy.”

Several surveys that are either already ongoing or bound to start over the next couple of years promise relevant additional data, both spectra (SDSS-V, 4MOST) and precise distances (LSST/Rubin Observatory), should enable astronomers to make a firm decision on whether or not Shakti and Shiva are indeed a glimpse of our home galaxy’s earliest prehistory.

Finding viable alternatives to traditional petroleum-based plastics and microplastics has never been more important. New research from scientists at the University of California San Diego and materials-science company Algenesis shows that their plant-based polymers biodegrade — even at the microplastic level — in under seven months. The paper, whose authors are all UC San Diego professors, alumni or former research scientists, appears in Nature Scientific Reports.

“We’re just starting to understand the implications of microplastics. We’ve only scratched the surface of knowing the environmental and health impacts,” stated Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Michael Burkart, one of the paper’s authors and an Algenesis co-founder. “We’re trying to find replacements for materials that already exist, and make sure these replacements will biodegrade at the end of their useful life instead of collecting in the environment. That’s not easy.”

“When we first created these algae-based polymers about six years ago, our intention was always that it be completely biodegradable,” said another of the paper’s authors, Robert Pomeroy, who is also a professor of chemistry and biochemistry and an Algenesis co-founder. “We had plenty of data to suggest that our material was disappearing in the compost, but this is the first time we’ve measured it at the microparticle level.”

Putting it to the test

To test its biodegradability, the team ground their product into fine microparticles, and used three different measurement tools to confirm that, when placed in a compost, the material was being digested by microbes.

The first tool was a respirometer. When the microbes break down compost material, they release carbon dioxide (CO2), which the respirometer measures. These results were compared to the breakdown of cellulose, which is considered the industry standard of 100% biodegradability. The plant-based polymer matched the cellulose at almost one hundred percent.

Next the team used water flotation. Since plastics are not water soluble and they float, they can easily be scooped off the surface of water. At intervals of 90 and 200 days, almost 100% of the petroleum-based microplastics were recovered, meaning none of it had biodegraded. On the other hand, after 90 days, only 32% of the algae-based microplastics were recovered, showing that more than two thirds of it had biodegraded. After 200 days, only 3% was recovered indicating that 97% of it had disappeared.

The last measurement involved chemical analysis via gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GCMS), which detected the presence of the monomers used to make the plastic, indicating that the polymer was being broken to its starting plant materials. Scanning-electron microscopy further showed how microorganisms colonize the biodegradable microplastics during composting.

“This material is the first plastic demonstrated to not create microplastics as we use it,” said Stephen Mayfield, a paper coauthor, School of Biological Sciences professor and co-founder of Algenesis. “This is more than just a sustainable solution for the end-of-product life cycle and our crowded landfills. This is actually plastic that is not going to make us sick.”

Creating an eco-friendly alternative to petroleum-based plastics is only one part of the long road to viability. The ongoing challenge is to be able to use the new material on pre-existing manufacturing equipment that was originally built for traditional plastic, and here Algenesis is making progress. They have partnered with several companies to make products that use the plant-based polymers developed at UC San Diego, including Trelleborg for use in coated fabrics and RhinoShield for use in the production of cell phone cases.

“When we started this work, we were told it was impossible,” stated Burkart. “Now we see a different reality. There’s a lot of work to be done, but we want to give people hope. It is possible.”

Full list of authors: Robert S. Pomeroy, Michael D. Burkart, Steven P. Mayfield (all UC San Diego), Marco N. Allemann, Marissa Tessman, Jaysen Reindel, Gordon B. Scofield, Payton Evans, Ryan Simkovsky (all Algenesis).

This research was supported by funding from the Department of Energy (DE-SC0019986 and DE-EE0009295).

Disclosure: Burkart, Mayfield and Pomeroy are co-founders of and hold equity positions in Algenesis Corporation.

“If you ask me, this is the main cause of systemic aging in the whole body,” says co-author and molecular biologist Jan Hoeijmakers of the Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam; the University of Cologne; and Oncode Institute/Princess Maxima Institute, Utrecht.

The authors span four research groups from Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States, with each group arriving at the same conclusions using different methods.

Aging is associated with changes at the molecular, cellular, and organ level — from altered protein production to sub-optimal cell metabolism to compromised tissue architecture. These changes are thought to originate from DNA damage resulting from cumulative exposure to harmful agents such as UV radiation or reactive oxygen species generated by our own metabolism.

While a lot of research in aging has focused on specific genes that might accelerate or slow aging, investigations of exactly which genes are more susceptible to aging have revealed no clear pattern in terms of gene function. Instead, susceptibility seems to be linked to the genes’ lengths.

“For a long time, the aging field has been focused on genes associated with aging, but our explanation is that it is much more random — it’s a physical phenomenon related to the length of the genes and not to the specific genes involved or the function of those genes,” says co-author Ander Izeta of the Biogipuzkoa Health Research Institute and Donostia University Hospital, Spain.

It essentially comes down to chance; long genes simply have more potential sites that could be damaged. The researchers compare it to a road trip — the longer the trip, the more likely that something will go wrong. And because some cell types tend to express long genes more than others, these cells are more likely to accumulate DNA damage as they age. Cells that don’t (or very rarely) divide also seem to be more susceptible compared to rapidly replicating cells because long-lived cells have more time to accumulate DNA damage and must rely on DNA repair mechanisms to fix them, whereas rapidly dividing cells tend to be short-lived.

Because neural cells are known to express particularly long genes and are also slow or non-dividing, they are especially susceptible to the phenomenon, and the researchers highlight the link between aging and neurodegeneration. Many of the genes involved in preventing protein aggregation in Alzheimer’s disease are exceptionally long, and pediatric cancer patients, who are cured by DNA-damaging chemotherapy, later suffer from premature aging and neurodegeneration.

The authors speculate that damage to long genes could explain most of the features of aging because it is associated with known aging accelerants and because it can be mitigated with known anti-aging therapies, such as dietary restriction (which has been shown to limit DNA damage).

“Many different things that are known to affect aging seem to lead to this length-dependent regulation, for example, different types of irradiation, smoking, alcohol, diet, and oxidative stress,” says co-author Thomas Stoeger of Northwestern University.

However, although the association between the decline in long-gene expression and aging is strong, causative evidence remains to be demonstrated. “Of course, you never know which came first, the egg or the chicken, but we can see a strong relationship between this phenomenon and many of the well-known hallmarks of aging,” says Izeta.

In future studies, the researchers plan to further investigate the phenomenon’s mechanism and evolutionary implications and to explore its relationship with neurodegeneration.