In the digestive system, there’s a delicate balance of bacterial populations. When this balance is disrupted, bad bacteria can take over the colon, causing it to swell, resulting in colitis. Certain diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease and Crohn’s disease, involve chronic colitis and currently require immunosuppressants to treat them. These drugs are expensive and non-specific, sometimes giving rise to antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

An alternative strategy is to deliver beneficial bacteria, or probiotics, to help restore balance. But to reach the colon, a treatment must first pass through stomach acid, withstand being cleared out by the intestine, then fight for space alongside the numerous invading bacteria. Pairing probiotics with a drug delivery system could make this strategy feasible, though most current approaches simply protect the probiotics from digestion without affecting the microbes responsible for the condition. So, Zhenzhong Zhang, Junjie Liu, Jinjin Shi and colleagues wanted to combine probiotics with specialized microgel spheres that could not only protect the good bacteria, but also actively help clear out the bad.

To create their system, the researchers combined sodium alginate, tungsten and calcium-containing nanoparticles into small, spherical microgels, then coated them with beneficial, probiotic bacteria. The gels protected the bacteria as they made their way through the stomach and increased their retention time in the colon. Once there, calprotectin proteins — highly expressed during colitis — bound to the calcium and disassembled the gels, allowing the tungsten to escape. By displacing molybdenum in a key enzyme substrate of the bad bacterium Enterobacteriaceae, tungsten inhibited the microbe’s growth while leaving the probiotics unaffected. In experiments using a colitis mouse model, the system allowed probiotics to proliferate in the intestine without any side effects. Additionally, mice with the microgel spheres did not exhibit many of the hallmarks of colitis, such as shortened colons or damaged intestinal barriers, showing that the delivery system could be a viable treatment strategy. Though the researchers also want to prove its utility in more advanced preclinical models, they say that this work provides a new perspective into treatments using colonizing probiotics.

The authors acknowledge funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Outstanding Youth Foundation of Henan Province and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation.

Research by Lancaster University’s School of Engineering and the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology combined a tidal range power generation model with its cost model to demonstrate the viability of tidal power.

Professor George Aggidis, Head of Energy Engineering at Lancaster University, said: “The obvious question for the UK, with one of the best tidal resources globally, is why haven’t we already got a tidal barrage scheme?”

The research published in Energy demonstrates the benefits of tidal energy, which does not suffer from unpredictable intermittency as power is generated both day and night.

The creation of a tidal barrage could operate for 120 years or more to meet future demand and storage problems.

Professor Aggidis said: “There is an urgent need to kick-start the selection and development of schemes around Britain. Tidal range generation is predictable renewable energy driven by the gravitational pull of the moon and sun. The environmental and economic benefits are huge as barrages can protect coastal areas from flooding and sea level rise. With two-way generation and pumping, the full range of existing tides can be maintained within impoundments to protect and support low-lying intertidal areas such as saltmarshes and mudflats.

Our studies show that with modern technology and operating procedures, estuarine barrages are the only practical way to protect these vital habitats. Coastal lagoons have also been proposed for several locations around Britain’s coast. Schemes will provide jobs in construction and manufacturing for generations to come as well as opportunities for transport, communication, conservation, and recreation. In the long-term they will provide reliable power with reduced costs.”

The UK has the second highest tidal range in the world and offers the UK a level of independence from global prices and in the long-term cheap clean power.

Currently the Tidal Range projects under commercial consideration offer an achievable 10 GW installed capacity, delivering over 20TWh/y, about 5% of UK energy use. Based on the UK relevant resource availability there is the potential to further increase this installed capacity over 4 to 5 times with other tidal range project sites around the UK.

Such developments are essential to assist the UK to reduce its carbon emissions by replacing fossil fuel power stations. The current UK total generating capacity is around 42.8 GW that includes fossil fuels (19.2GW 44.9%), renewables (16.5GW, 38.5%), and low carbon (7.1GW — 16.6%). The La Rance Tidal Range plant in France today generates the cheapest electricity in the EDF fleet — cheaper than nuclear.

Working with partners, ORNL engineers are placing low-powered sensors in the reflective raised pavement markers that are already used to help drivers identify lanes. According to a paper in IEEE Sensors by ORNL researcher Ali Ekti with lead author Sachin Sharma of WMU, microchips inside the markers transmit information to passing cars about the road shape. They are effective even when vehicle cameras or remote laser sensing called LiDAR are unreliable because of fog, snow, glare or other obstructions.

“We are working to make autonomous driving features accurate and safe in more remote areas,” Ekti said. “And we are doing it by converting a dummy piece of infrastructure into something with many more uses.”

Not only does the technology provide more accurate information about the driving environment, but it also shifts some of the processing load from the car’s software onto infrastructure. This saves electric vehicle battery power, extending driving range to promote wider EV adoption. Compared with a leading camera and LiDAR-based autonomous driving technology, the chip-enabled pavement markers can reduce navigational power consumption by up to 90%, the authors reported in a technical paper.

The technology has potential for use with not only tomorrow’s self-driving vehicles, but also today’s common autonomous driving features, such as lane assist.

The effort is part of a larger project led by WMU, which is teaming with research and industry partners to develop related sensor and autonomous driving technologies such as radar retro-reflectors, high-definition mapping, computational offloading and weather sensing. WMU researchers are also using a vehicle driving on a closed course to measure the reduction in vehicle energy use that is enabled by these technologies, said Zachary Asher, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and director of the WMU Energy Efficient and Autonomous Vehicles Lab.

ORNL researchers experimented to find the best combination of transceiver, battery and antenna for the sensor package inside standard road markers, as well as those that are designed to withstand snowplows. They then utilized a communications protocol that involves hopping across a particular radio frequency spectrum up to 50 times a second. “It’s hard to detect, works well against interference, is low cost and doesn’t consume a lot of power,” Ekti said. Adjustments to the equipment could ensure its battery would last for the same replacement cycle as the pavement markers, typically a year.

Ekti’s team created algorithms that triangulate among the GPS coordinates of lane markers to reconstruct an image of the drivable area. One algorithm is embedded in a microchip inside the pavement marker, while a decoding algorithm is incorporated into the car’s software.

ORNL researchers field-tested the sensor platform in a variety of weather conditions and in a remote national park in Montana with no wireless access. They found that it transmits more than five times beyond the original 100-meter goal.

“It’s amazing how far it can transmit — over hills, in snow. It’s a big deal,” Asher said. “Every step of the way, we’re surprised at how well this technology is working, and we’re finding some really cool ways it could be integrated.”

The sensors could also signal temporary lane shifts or closures in construction zones when high-definition maps might be out of date. Marker sensors could eventually convey information about temperature, humidity and traffic volume, Ekti said. The project team plans to work with students to build a smaller microchip for the markers as a substitute for more expensive off-the-shelf products.

Asher is planning road demonstrations for stakeholders including the Tennessee and Michigan departments of transportation, the Michigan Office of Future Mobility and the City of Chattanooga. These government agencies decide which technologies are implemented in infrastructure, so their involvement in the development process is critical, Asher said.

Venture capitalists and Silicon Valley have typically regarded self-driving vehicles as a software problem, Asher said. “With the hindsight of 10 years of highly- funded development, we now know that software and cameras alone don’t provide an easy solution,” he said. “Perhaps a more patient approach, using infrastructure-based hardware in coordination with government transportation agencies, is the way to achieve zero-accident vehicles which actually use energy sustainably.”

Part of the ORNL research was conducted at DOE’s National Transportation Research Center. The Vehicle Technologies Office under DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy provided funding. Contributing ORNL researchers include Ross Wang, Jason Richards, Elizabeth Piersall, David Pesin, Ozgur Alaca and Shean Huff.