With its exquisite sensitivity, Webb captured Uranus’ dim inner and outer rings, including the elusive Zeta ring — the extremely faint and diffuse ring closest to the planet. It also imaged many of the planet’s 27 known moons, even seeing some small moons within the rings.

In visible wavelengths as seen by Voyager 2 in the 1980s, Uranus appeared as a placid, solid blue ball. In infrared wavelengths, Webb is revealing a strange and dynamic ice world filled with exciting atmospheric features.

One of the most striking of these is the planet’s seasonal north polar cloud cap. Compared to the Webb image from earlier this year, some details of the cap are easier to see in these newer images. These include the bright, white, inner cap and the dark lane in the bottom of the polar cap, toward the lower latitudes.

Several bright storms can also be seen near and below the southern border of the polar cap. The number of these storms, and how frequently and where they appear in Uranus’s atmosphere, might be due to a combination of seasonal and meteorological effects.

The polar cap appears to become more prominent when the planet’s pole begins to point toward the Sun, as it approaches solstice and receives more sunlight. Uranus reaches its next solstice in 2028, and astronomers are eager to watch any possible changes in the structure of these features. Webb will help disentangle the seasonal and meteorological effects that influence Uranus’s storms, which is critical to help astronomers understand the planet’s complex atmosphere.

Because Uranus spins on its side at a tilt of about 98 degrees, it has the most extreme seasons in the solar system. For nearly a quarter of each Uranian year, the Sun shines over one pole, plunging the other half of the planet into a dark, 21-year-long winter.

With Webb’s unparalleled infrared resolution and sensitivity, astronomers now see Uranus and its unique features with groundbreaking new clarity. These details, especially of the close-in Zeta ring, will be invaluable to planning any future missions to Uranus.

Uranus can also serve as a proxy for studying the nearly 2,000 similarly sized exoplanets that have been discovered in the last few decades. This “exoplanet in our backyard” can help astronomers understand how planets of this size work, what their meteorology is like, and how they formed. This can in turn help us understand our own solar system as a whole by placing it in a larger context.

These new findings underscore the urgency of addressing adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) — potentially traumatic events that occur before 18 years of age — and taking steps to mitigate their long-term impact on people’s health.

The study reviews research carried out across 75 years, involving 826,452 adults. Published in the peer-reviewed journal European Journal of Psychotraumatology, it reveals that individuals who have been exposed to various forms of traumatic events in childhood are at an increased risk of experiencing chronic pain and pain-related disability in adulthood, particularly those subjected to physical abuse. The cumulative impact of exposure to multiple ACEs further exacerbates this risk.

“These results are extremely concerning, particularly as over 1 billion children — half of the global child population — are exposed to ACEs each year, putting them at increased risk of chronic pain and disability later in life,” says lead author Dr André Bussières, from the School of Physical & Occupational Therapy at McGill University, in Canada.

“There is an urgent need to develop targeted interventions and support systems to break the cycle of adversity and improve long-term health outcomes for those individuals who have been exposed to childhood trauma.”

ACEs may affect a child or teenager directly through physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, or neglect — or indirectly through exposure to environmental factors like domestic violence, living with substance abuse or parental loss. Chronic pain, affecting between one-third and one-half of the UK population alone, is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide. Long-term painful conditions such as low back pain, arthritis, headache and migraine, can affect a person’s daily functioning to the point they can’t work, eat properly, or participate in physical activities.

Previous research has indicated a positive relationship between exposure to ACEs and chronic pain in adulthood. However, there are still gaps in knowledge — particularly around which type of ACEs are associated with specific pain-related conditions, or whether a dose-response relationship exists.

To help address these gaps, the authors carried out a systematic review that included 85 studies. Of those, results from 57 studies could be pooled in meta-analyses. They found that:

• Individuals exposed to a direct ACE, whether physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, or neglect, were 45% more likely to report chronic pain in adulthood compared to those not exposed.

“These results underscore the urgency of addressing ACES, particularly in light of their prevalence and health repercussions,” says the senior author Professor Jan Hartvigsen, from the University of Southern Denmark.

“A more nuanced understanding of the precise relationship between ACEs and chronic pain will empower healthcare professionals and policymakers to devise targeted strategies to help diminish the long-term impact of early-life adversity on adult health.”

The authors propose that future research should delve into the biological mechanisms through which ACEs affect health across the lifespan, aiming to deepen understanding and develop ways to mitigate their impact.

In Greek, apnea (ἄπνοια) denotes the “absence of breathing.” Hence, obstructive sleep apnea is a disease defined by interruptions in breathing, which recurs while the person suffering from it is asleep. A feeling of breathlessness, fatigue and drowsiness are symptoms that patients suffer. This disease is also related to the incidence of cardiovascular disorders, so to deal with these related problems, adequate diagnosis of the severity of the disease is necessary.

Alterations in the metabolism of people with sleep apnea are key to determining the severity of the disease. These changes are usually analyzed in blood or urine. However, in search of a less invasive and more accessible alternative, a team from the Department of Analytical Chemistry at the University of Córdoba and the Maimonides Institute for Biomedical Research in Córdoba (IMIBIC), formed by researchers Laura Castillo, Mónica Calderón, Feliciano Priego and Bernabé Jurado, has verified, for the first time, the potential of sweat samples to ascertain the severity of sleep apnea.

“By analyzing sweat metabolome and its alterations, mainly at night, we were able to see what stage of the disease the patients were in,” explains Laura Castillo, the study’s lead author. For her, the advantages of using sweat over other samples are clear: “it is a non-invasive and clean sample since, unlike the case with blood, we don’t have to remove proteins, and it’s much easier to analyze and detect metabolites.”

In this study, sweat samples from before and after sleep were analyzed from a series of individuals with sleep apnea at different stages, as well as from a control group without the disease.

In these samples, using the gas chromatography technique, coupled with high-resolution mass spectrometry, 78 metabolites were identified and their changes were studied, mostly related to energy production and oxidative stress. “We could see how the sweat metabolism itself indicates those alterations during sleep as a result of which the person’s energy production worsens and their oxidative stress increases,” says Castillo. Thus, with a personalized follow-up using the sweat excreted during the sleep of a person with the disease, its development can be tracked, and its possible effects, such as cardiovascular problems, can be monitored. This metabolomic profile also made it possible, in the trial, to distinguish between those who suffered from the disease and those who did not have it and belonged to the control group.

An index to learn more about the disease

In addition to establishing sweat as a good sentinel when it comes to determining the stage of the disease, this work also reveals the importance of taking into account the oxygen desaturation index when diagnosing it.

The diagnosis of sleep apnea is currently based on the Apnea-Hypopnea Index (AHI), which measures sleep apnea based on the episodes of shortness of breath one suffers per hour (for example, the disease is severe when one has 30 or more episodes per hour). According to the team, this index “does not provide all the information about the disease or the patient’s situation at a given time” since it counts how many events there are, but not their severity.

Therefore, in their study they also verify the importance of using the oxygen desaturation index, which shows how serious the episodes are by measuring the number of events in which oxygen saturation has decreased by more than 3%. After verifying the linear relationship between this index and the AHI, its validity has been confirmed, since, in addition to the data provided by the AHI, it also measures severity, taking into account oxygen saturation loss.

Details of their breakthrough were published in the journal Acta Materialia on November 17, 2024.

Hydrogen is carbon dioxide free, and it has long been touted as a source of clean energy. Yet, shifting society towards a hydrogen energy-based one requires overcoming some significant technical issues. Structural and functional materials that produce, store, transport and preserve hydrogen are needed.

To develop advanced materials for hydrogen-related applications, a fundamental understanding of how hydrogen behaves in alloys is crucial. However, current technology falls short in this area. Detecting atomic state hydrogen — the smallest atom in the universe — with X-rays or lasers is challenging due to its unique characteristics. Researchers are currently focusing on better analytical and visualization techniques that can incorporate high spatial and time resolutions simultaneously.

Hiroshi Kakinuma, an assistant professor at Tohoku University, and his co-authors developed a new visualization technique harnessing an optical microscope and polyaniline layer. “When the color of the polyaniline layer reacts with the atomic state hydrogen in metals, it changes colors, allowing us to analyze the flow of hydrogen atoms based on the color distribution of the polyaniline layer,” points out Kakinuma. “Additionally, optical microscopes can observe the sub-millimeter-scale view with microscale spatial resolution in real time, thereby capturing hydrogen behavior with unprecedented high spatial and time resolutions.”

Thanks to this method, the researchers successfully filmed the flow of hydrogen atoms in pure nickel (Ni). The color of polyaniline changed from purple to white when reacting with hydrogen atoms in a metal. In situ visualization revealed that hydrogen atoms in pure Ni preferentially diffused through grain boundaries in disordered Ni atoms.

Furthermore, the group found that hydrogen diffusion was dependent on the geometrical structure of the grain boundaries: the hydrogen flux grew at grain boundaries with large geometric spaces. These results experimentally clarified the relationship between the atomic-scale structure of pure Ni and the hydrogen diffusion behavior.

The approach has broader applications as well. It can be applied to other metals and alloys, such as steels and aluminum alloys, and drastically facilitates elucidating the microscopic hydrogen-material interactions, which could be further investigated through simulations.

“Understanding hydrogen behaviors related to the atomic-scale structure of alloys will enable efficient alloy design, which will dramatically accelerate the development of highly functional materials and usher us one step closer to a hydrogen energy-based society,” adds Kakinuma.