Working with a select number of London schools, researchers from Surrey’s Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE) investigated whether putting up a green screen along the perimeter fence of a school, installing air purifiers in classrooms, and organising school street initiatives during pick-up and drop-off hours, improved air quality of classrooms and playgrounds. These initiatives were funded by Impact on Urban Health.

The researchers found that air purifiers in classrooms reduced indoor pollution concentrations by up to 57%, and the School Streets initiative, which stops motor vehicles driving past schools at the start and end of school days, reduced particle concentrations by up to 36%. Green screens at the school boundary reduced some of the most dangerous outdoor particle levels coming from roads by up to 44%, depending on wind conditions.

Prashant Kumar, founding Director of the Global Centre for Clean Air Research (GCARE) at the University of Surrey, said:

“Everybody, especially our children, deserves to live and work where the air is as clean and safe as possible. Unfortunately, the reality is far from ideal, with many of our schools unwittingly exposing children to harmful pollutants. The problem is particularly bad at schools near busy roads.

“Our research offers hope to many who care about this issue, as the results show that taking reasonable action can make a positive difference.”

Ten million students worldwide spend 30% of their daily lives at school, with 70% of this time being spent indoors. Currently, 7,000 UK schools breach the World Health Organization’s air quality limits, leaving children vulnerable to respiratory diseases, affected lung and brain health, behavioural problems, and increased risk of cancer.

Kate Langford, Programme Director of the Health Effects of Air pollution programme at Impact on Urban Health, funders of the research, said:

“Every child has the right to learn in an environment that keeps them safe and healthy. But, every day, children are exposed to dangerously high levels of air pollution in and around schools.

“Our partnership with Arup, Global Action Plan and the University of Surrey has shown there are practical ways that we can protect children in and around schools and can help guide schools to implement these solutions.

“These measures now need to be combined with efforts from local authorities at regional and national levels to improve air quality and create healthier places for children to live, learn and play.”

Larissa Lockwood, Director of Clean Air at Global Action Plan, said:

“Schools should be safe places of learning, not places where students are at risk of health hazards. There is no safe level of air pollution, but children are particularly vulnerable to its impacts including the development of organs and their ability to learn. Services like the London Schools Pollution Helpdesk ensure that schools have access to advice on what they can do to reduce exposure to air pollution, including the measures tested in this research. But this needs to be rolled out nationally — all children must be protected from the health effects of air pollution in their everyday lives.”

Professor Prashant Kumar concluded:

“My simple plea to decision-makers in the UK is this: simple actions speak louder than words. By giving every school resources to implement one of the measures detailed in our research, they could make a world of difference to tens of thousands of children in this country.”

The study was co-designed by Global Action Plan and Arup and supported by Impact on Urban Health.

The research was published in the journal Atmospheric Environment. Schools looking to implement changes can use a toolkit for guidance and should seek advice from an air quality specialist.

Now, a team of researchers has investigated how the narrow temperature ranges of a tropical climate impact the incidence of a specific type of myocardial infarction (the medical term for a heart attack) in Singapore. The researchers say their findings, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, could have health policy implications for populations within cosmopolitan cities in the tropics.

“Using 10 years of nationally collected data, we found strong evidence that a drop of 1°C in ambient temperature increased the risk of a type of acute myocardial infarction in the population by 12 per cent,” said co-senior author Professor Marcus Ong, Director of the Health Services & Systems Research Programme and the Pre-hospital & Emergency Research Centre (PERC) at Duke-NUS Medical School.

“Furthermore, people aged 65 and above appeared to be about 20 per cent more vulnerable to cooler temperatures compared to younger people,” added Prof Ong, who is also Senior Consultant at the Department of Emergency Medicine at Singapore General Hospital (SGH).

The study, which was conducted in collaboration with Singapore’s National Environment Agency (NEA), analysed daily patient records from the Singapore Myocardial Infarction Registry. The researchers were specifically looking for people who experienced non-ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (NSTEMI). This is a type of acute heart attack that happens when a blood vessel feeding the heart becomes partially blocked. When doctors examine the patient’s electrocardiogram (ECG) results, they don’t find the easily identifiable ST elevation that signifies another type of heart attack, STEMI, which occurs when the coronary artery is completely blocked. Since the 1980s, the incidence of NSTEMI has risen while that of STEMI has declined.

The researchers were able to collect 60,643 reports of NSTEMI between 2009 and 2018. They then statistically analysed how the onset of NSTEMI in these patients correlated with local meteorological data obtained from weather stations across Singapore, including mean temperature and rainfall.

Cooler ambient temperatures were independently associated with an increased risk of NSTEMI up to 10 days after a temperature drop. There were no gender differences relating to the effects of warmer or cooler temperatures on NSTEMI risk. Nor were changes in rainfall associated with an increased risk.

“Our study found that even in a relatively warm part of the world, cooler ambient temperatures increased the risk of heart attacks,” said Dr Andrew Ho, one of the study’s first authors, who is an Assistant Professor with PERC and an Associate Consultant with SGH’s Department of Emergency Medicine. “This improves our understanding that deviations from the temperature that one is used to can lead to harmful bodily stress. Consistent with our previous studies that showed that the elderly were more susceptible to environmental stressors including air pollution, we found some evidence that this group of individuals were at greater risk of heart attacks at cooler temperatures.”

“There are several individual-level risk factors for cardiovascular disease, but none are as widely experienced as weather patterns,” said Dr Joel Aik, an environmental epidemiologist and co-senior author of the study from NEA, who is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor with PERC. “Daily weather variations have the capacity to trigger cardiovascular disease events in at-risk individuals, with particular implications for Singapore’s ageing population. In the context of climate change, these findings highlight a risk factor of substantial public health concern.”

Further research over a longer period is needed to confirm the results. The team also recommends research that helps to identify the biological pathways involved in increased vulnerability of the elderly to cold-related NSTEMI in the tropics.

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Lead author Theresa Andrasfay, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Southern California Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, and coauthor Noreen Goldman at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs first examined the pandemic’s effect on U.S. life expectancy in October 2020. Their initial study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in January 2021, showed that 2020 presented the largest single-year decline in life expectancy in at least 40 years and the lowest life expectancy estimated since 2003.

The updated analysis, published in PLOS ONE, indicates that U.S. life expectancy at birth decreased by 2.2 years from 78.8 in 2019 to 76.6 in 2021. The estimated decrease in life expectancy for 2021 is 0.6 years larger than the decrease observed in 2020, Andrasfay said.

“Despite the availability of effective vaccines, life expectancy continued to decline in 2021. Part of this is due to the large number of COVID-19 deaths that occurred in the beginning of 2021, before many individuals were eligible for vaccination,” she said. “But even once all adults became eligible for vaccination, many chose not to be vaccinated and even vaccinated individuals were not completely protected against the highly transmissible Delta and Omicron variants.”

The study highlighted that significant racial disparities in loss of lifespan have endured throughout the pandemic. Between 2019 and 2021, non-Latino whites lost 2 years on average, while non-Latino Blacks lost 3.5 years and Latinos lost 3.7 years of life expectancy. As noted in Andrasfay and Goldman’s previous analyses, Black and Latino Americans have experienced a disproportionate burden of coronavirus infections and deaths, reflecting persistent structural inequalities that heighten risk of exposure to and death from COVID-19. Goldman noted that “although Whites experienced a larger drop in life expectancy between 2020 and 2021 than the Black and Latino populations, resulting in a very modest reduction in racial and ethnic differences, the disparities in life expectancy loss since the start of the pandemic remain regrettably and unacceptably large.”

Although COVID-19 is the primary cause of continued life expectancy reductions in 2021, “increases in other causes of death relative to pre-pandemic levels contribute to these life expectancy declines,” the authors wrote. The pandemic appears to have played a role in the increase of drug overdose deaths in 2020 and 2021, and increased mortality from conditions such as heart disease or diabetes may be attributable to complications of Covid-19 infections and/or health care shortages and delays.

This week the CDC also released provisional estimates of life expectancy in 2021. “We did not have access to the same level of detailed data as the CDC, so we arrived at slightly different life expectancy estimates,” Andrasfay said. “Despite these differences, our results are largely in agreement in that we find continued life expectancy reductions in 2021 and persistent racial and ethnic disparities.”

“COVID-19 mortality has been lower in the first half of 2022 compared to 2021, so if there is a successful booster campaign in the fall and the dominant strains have lower fatality rates than previous variants, it is possible that 2022 life expectancy may improve relative to 2021, though it is unlikely to return to levels seen prior to 2020,” she added. “However, what happens with 2022 life expectancy will ultimately depend on this coming fall and winter.”

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Materials provided by University of Southern California. Original written by Beth Newcomb. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The conditions in the interior of icy giant planets like Neptune and Uranus are extreme: temperatures reach several thousand degrees Celsius, and the pressure is millions of times greater than in the Earth’s atmosphere. Nonetheless, states like this can be simulated briefly in the lab: powerful laser flashes hit a film-like material sample, heat it up to 6,000 degrees Celsius for the blink of an eye and generate a shock wave that compresses the material for a few nanoseconds to a million times the atmospheric pressure. “Up to now, we used hydrocarbon films for these kinds of experiment,” explains Dominik Kraus, physicist at HZDR and professor at the University of Rostock. “And we discovered that this extreme pressure produced tiny diamonds, known as nanodiamonds.”

Using these films, however, it was only partially possible to simulate the interior of planets — because ice giants not only contain carbon and hydrogen but also vast amounts of oxygen. When searching for suitable film material, the group hit on an everyday substance: PET, the resin out of which ordinary plastic bottles are made. “PET has a good balance between carbon, hydrogen and oxygen to simulate the activity in ice planets,” Kraus explains. The team conducted its experiments at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, the location of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), a powerful, accelerator-based X-ray laser. They used it to analyze what happens when intensive laser flashes hit a PET film, employing two measurement methods at the same time: X-ray diffraction to determine whether nanodiamonds were produced and so-called small-angle scattering to see how quickly and how large the diamonds grew.

A big helper: oxygen

“The effect of the oxygen was to accelerate the splitting of the carbon and hydrogen and thus encourage the formation of nanodiamonds,” says Dominik Kraus, reporting on the results. “It meant the carbon atoms could combine more easily and form diamonds.” This further supports the assumption that it literally rains diamonds inside the ice giants. The findings are probably not just relevant to Uranus and Neptune but to innumerable other planets in our galaxy as well. While such ice giants used to be thought of as rarities, it now seems clear that they are probably the most common form of planet outside the solar system.

The team also encountered hints of another kind: In combination with the diamonds, water should be produced — but in an unusual variant. “So-called superionic water may have formed,” Kraus opines. “The oxygen atoms form a crystal lattice in which the hydrogen nuclei move around freely.” Because the nuclei are electrically charged, superionic water can conduct electric current and thus help to create the ice giants’ magnetic field. In their experiments, however, the research group was not yet able to unequivocally prove the existence of superionic water in the mixture with diamonds. This is planned to happen in close collaboration with the University of Rostock at the European XFEL in Hamburg, the world’s most powerful X-ray laser. There, HZDR heads the international user consortium HIBEF which offers ideal conditions for experiments of this kind.

Precision plant for nanodiamonds

In addition to this rather fundamental knowledge, the new experiment also opens up perspectives for a technical application: the tailored production of nanometer-sized diamonds, which are already included in abrasives and polishing agents. In the future, they are supposed to be used as highly-sensitive quantum sensors, medical contrast agents and efficient reaction accelerators, for splitting CO2 for example. “So far, diamonds of this kind have mainly been produced by detonating explosives,” Kraus explains. “With the help of laser flashes, they could be manufactured much more cleanly in the future.”

The scientists’ vision: A high-performance laser fires ten flashes per second at a PET film which is illuminated by the beam at intervals of a tenth of a second. The nanodiamonds thus created shoot out of the film and land in a collecting tank filled with water. There they are decelerated and can then be filtered and effectively harvested. The essential advantage of this method in contrast to production by explosives is that “the nanodiamonds could be custom cut with regard to size or even doping with other atoms,” Dominik Kraus emphasizes. “The X-ray laser means we have a lab tool that can precisely control the diamonds’ growth.”

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Soil moisture is an important variable in forested and agricultural ecosystems alike, particularly under the recent drought conditions of past Maine summers. Despite the robust soil moisture monitoring networks and large, freely available databases, the cost of commercial soil moisture sensors and the power that they use to run can be prohibitive for researchers, foresters, farmers and others tracking the health of the land.

Along with researchers at the University of New Hampshire and University of Vermont, UMaine’s WiSe-Net designed a wireless sensor network that uses artificial intelligence to learn how to be more power efficient in monitoring soil moisture and processing the data. The research was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

“AI can learn from the environment, predict the wireless link quality and incoming solar energy to efficiently use limited energy and make a robust low cost network run longer and more reliably,” says Ali Abedi, principal investigator of the recent study and professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Maine.

The software learns over time how to make the best use of available network resources, which helps produce power efficient systems at a lower cost for large scale monitoring compared to the existing industry standards.

WiSe-Net also collaborated with Aaron Weiskittel, director of the Center for Research on Sustainable Forests, to ensure that all hardware and software research is informed by the science and tailored to the research needs.

“Soil moisture is a primary driver of tree growth, but it changes rapidly, both daily as well as seasonally,” Weiskittel says. “We have lacked the ability to monitor effectively at scale. Historically, we used expensive sensors that collected at fixed intervals — every minute, for example — but were not very reliable. A cheaper and more robust sensor with wireless capabilities like this really opens the door for future applications for researchers and practitioners alike.”

The study was published Aug. 9, 2022, in the Springer’s International Journal of Wireless Information Networks.

Although the system designed by the researchers focuses on soil moisture, the same methodology could be extended to other types of sensors, like ambient temperature, snow depth and more, as well as scaling up the networks with more sensor nodes.

“Real-time monitoring of different variables requires different sampling rates and power levels. An AI agent can learn these and adjust the data collection and transmission frequency accordingly rather than sampling and sending every single data point, which is not as efficient,” Abedi says.

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The new findings, published in July in Chemical Science, may enable the rational design of unique materials based on the rippled sheet architecture.

“Our study establishes the rippled beta sheet layer configuration as a motif with general features and opens the road to structure-based design of unique molecular architectures, with potential for materials development and biomedical applications,” said Jevgenij Raskatov, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UC Santa Cruz and corresponding author of the paper.

Proteins come in an enormous range of shapes and sizes to carry out their myriad structural and functional roles in living cells. Certain common structural motifs, such as the alpha helix, are found in many protein structures.

The rippled sheet is a variation on the pleated beta sheet, a well-known structural motif found in thousands of proteins. Linus Pauling and Robert Corey described the rippled beta sheet in 1953, two years after introducing the concept of the pleated beta sheet. While the pleated beta sheet is well known and often called simply the beta sheet, the rippled sheet remained a largely theoretical structure for decades.

In a previous study published in 2021, Raskatov’s team reported obtaining a rippled beta sheet structure by mixing a small peptide with equal amounts of its mirror image. The researchers used mirror-image forms of triphenylalanine, a short peptide consisting of three phenylalanine amino acids. The mirror-image peptides joined in pairs to form “dimers” with the predicted structure, but they did not form the extended, periodic rippled beta-sheet layer topography hypothesized by Pauling and Corey.

“The dimers packed together into herringbone layer structures, which raised doubt as to whether the periodic rippled beta-sheet layer configuration was viable,” Raskatov said.

In the new study, the researchers substituted other amino acids for one of the triphenylalanines to create slightly different tripeptides and their mirror-images. Using these new tripeptides, they were able to create three different aggregating peptide systems that formed extended antiparallel rippled beta sheet layers, in which mirror-image peptide strands were arranged in alternating fashion. The results of x-ray crystallography showed that the crystal structures are in excellent overall agreement with the predictions made by Pauling and Corey.

The co-first authors of the paper are Amaruka Hazari, a staff scientist in Raskatov’s lab, and Michael Sawaya at UCLA. Other coauthors include Timothy Johnstone at UC Santa Cruz and Niko Vlahakis, David Boyer, Jose Rodriguez, and David Eisenberg at UCLA. This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

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Materials provided by University of California – Santa Cruz. Original written by Tim Stephens. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.