Personal care and beauty products contain several ingredients that often include a wide range of endocrine-disrupting chemicals like phthalates, parabens, phenols, parabens and toxic metals. These chemicals interact with hormone systems, influencing synthesis, regulation, transport, metabolism and hormone reception, which are all especially vulnerable during pregnancy.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and National Institutes of Health-funded study, published in Environmental Research, examined the association between personal care product use and the levels of sex steroid hormones, including estrogens and progesterone and thyroid hormones among pregnant women. The researchers also explored how demographic factors impact the use of certain personal care products.

Researchers collected blood samples from 1,070 pregnant women between 18 and 40 years of age enrolled in the Puerto Rico PROTECT Cohort, an ongoing prospective birth study designed to examine environmental exposures in pregnant women and their children who live in the northern karst zone of Puerto Rico.

As part of the study, participants underwent physical exams and completed a series of questionnaires providing their demographics, occupation, lifestyle and use of personal care products like fragrances, lotions, cosmetics, nail polish, shaving cream, mouthwash, shampoo and other hair products, such as bleach, relaxers and mousse. Participants also provided blood samples twice throughout their pregnancies, which were analyzed for nine sex steroid and thyroid hormones.

The researchers found that the use of hair products, particularly hair dyes, bleach, relaxers and mousse are associated with lower levels of sex steroid hormones, which have a critical role maintaining pregnancy and fetal development. Disruptions of these hormones may contribute to adverse maternal and pregnancy outcomes like growth restriction, preterm birth and low birth weight.

“Alterations in hormone levels, especially during pregnancy, can have vast consequences beyond health at birth including changes in infant and child growth, pubertal trajectories and may influence development of hormone-sensitive cancers such as breast, uterine and ovarian cancer,” says the study’s lead author, Zorimar Rivera-Núñez, an assistant professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health. “Additional research should address the public health impact of exposure to chemicals in hair products in pregnant populations.”

The researchers also found that socioeconomic variables, such as income, education and employment status, influence the use of personal care products among pregnant women in Puerto Rico. For example, participants who reported a household income greater than $100,000 used personal care products more often than participants with lower household incomes. Additionally, employed participants reported using more cosmetics than those who were unemployed.

“Prior research has shown that non-pregnant populations have also reported associations between frequency of use and socioeconomic markers, such as household income and education,” Rivera-Núñez said. “A strong culture of beauty influences Latina women, which may impact consistent use of cosmetics through pregnancy. This data is important because it will allow us to identify populations who are at an increased risk of chemical exposures associated with personal care product use.”

The researchers, who include individuals from the Rutgers Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute, University of Michigan, University of Puerto Rico, University of Georgia and Northeastern University, recommend that primary physicians and obstetricians should speak to reproductive-age women about the potential health impact of endocrine disrupting chemicals, like those found in hair products.

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Materials provided by Rutgers University. Original written by Michelle Edelstein. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The way we instinctively speak to babies — higher pitch, slower speed, exaggerated pronunciation — not only appeals to them, but likely helps them learn to understand what we’re saying. New research from the University of Florida suggests that baby talk can have another, previously unknown benefit: helping babies learn to produce their own speech. By mimicking the sound of a smaller vocal tract, the researchers think, we’re cluing babies in to how the words should sound coming out of their own mouths.

“It seems to stimulate motor production of speech, not just the perception of speech,” said Matthew Masapollo, Ph.D., an assistant professor in UF’s Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences and director of the UF Laboratory for the Study of Cognition, Action, and Perception of Speech in the College of Public Health and Health Professions. “It’s not just goo-goo ga-ga.”

In the study, the researchers changed the frequency sounds to mimic either an infant or adult vocal tract, and then tested how infants reacted. Six- to eight-month-old babies “displayed a robust and distinct preference for speech with resonances specifying a vocal tract that is similar in size and length to their own,” they wrote.

Four- to six-month old babies didn’t have that preference, suggesting that older babies’ dawning ability to control their voices and make words out of babble could be what makes the infant-like sounds more appealing.

Though baby talk may sound simple, it’s accomplishing a lot, says coauthor Linda Polka, Ph.D., of McGill University.

“We’re trying to engage with the infant to show them something about speech production,” she said. “We’re priming them to process their own voice.”

While parents are sometimes discouraged from engaging in baby talk, Masapollo and Polka’s research shows the patterns associated with that speaking style — which scientists call “infant-directed speech” — could be a key component in helping babies make words.

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Materials provided by University of Florida. Original written by Alisson Clark. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

One of the obstacles to developing these “living biotherapeutics” is that many of the species that could be beneficial are harmed by oxygen, making it difficult to manufacture, store, and deliver them. MIT chemical engineers have now shown that they can protect those bacteria with a coating that helps them to survive the manufacturing process.

In a study appearing today in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the researchers showed they could use the coating on a strain of E. coli as well as another species that may aid in digestion of plant starches. The coating could be applied to many other species as well, they say.

“We believe this coating could be used to protect pretty much any microbe of interest,” says Ariel Furst, the Raymond and Helen St. Laurent Career Development Professor of Chemical Engineering and the senior author of the new study. “We think there are microbes out there that can help with a variety of diseases, and that we can protect them for manufacture and production.”

MIT postdoc Gang Fan is the lead author of the study. Pris Wasuwanich, an MIT undergraduate, and Mariela Rodriguez-Otero, a former MIT Materials Research Laboratory Summer Scholar, are also authors of the paper.

Protective coating

Most of the microbes that live in the human gut are anaerobic, and they have varying degrees of sensitivity to oxygen. Some can tolerate a little bit of oxygen, while for others, oxygen is deadly.

This makes it difficult to test their potential as treatments for human disease, because bacteria need to be freeze-dried and formulated as capsules in order to be used therapeutically. In this study, Furst and her colleagues decided to try protecting anaerobic bacteria by coating them with a material made from metal ions and organic compounds called polyphenols.

When polyphenols and metal ions are put into a solution, they form a two-dimensional, grid-like sheet. For this study, the researchers used iron, which is safe for human consumption, and three polyphenols that are all classified as GRAS (generally regarded as safe) by the Food and Drug Administration: gallic acid, tannic acid, and epigallocatechin (EGCG), all of which are found in tea and other plant products.

If bacteria are also added to the solution, the material self-assembles into a coating on individual bacterial cells. This coating protects bacteria during the freeze-drying and manufacturing process. The researchers showed that the coated cells were healthy and able to perform normal cellular activities, although their growth was temporarily inhibited.

When exposed to an acidic environment, such as that of the stomach, the coating breaks down and releases the bacteria.

Deploying bacteria

One of the strains that the researchers used to test the coating is Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron. This species, which has enzymes specialized to digest carbohydrates, appears to be more abundant in the gut microbiome of healthy people. However, it has been difficult to study how these bacteria might promote health if given as biotherapeutics, because they are very sensitive to oxygen.

Bacteria with this type of protective coating could also be useful for agricultural applications such as helping to make crops more stress-tolerant. Another possible application for the coating is to use it to protect microbes that are used as vaccines. The BCG vaccine, which consists of the bovine version of the microbe that causes tuberculosis, is difficult to produce and must be stored at low temperatures. Coating it with a protective layer could eliminate the need for cold storage and make distribution easier, Furst says.

“If we can remove the need for cold storage and transport, we think it would make a lot of therapeutics more widely available,” she says.

The research was funded by the MIT-Deshpande Center, the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program at MIT, and the MIT Materials Research Laboratory MRSEC Program of the National Science Foundation.

Unsuccessful efforts have been made for more than 20 years to develop field emission guns using theoretically high-performance nano materials. It has been found challenging to integrate a nanowire-based field emission gun into an electron microscope without undermining its physical properties, such as lives and stability. For this reason, commercially available field emission guns are still equipped with tungsten needles developed more than half a century ago.

This NIMS-JEOL research team 1) developed techniques to chemically synthesize and grow high-purity, single-crystal nanowires of LaB₆, known to be an excellent electron-emitting hot cathode material, 2) designed an electron source mechanism capable of efficiently emitting electrons and 3) developed techniques to extract a single nanowire and integrate it into an optimized electron source structure.

The LaB₆ nanowire-based electron source has a number of advantages: relatively moderate vacuum condition requirements, very high current stability, low extraction voltage, narrow electron beam energy distribution width and high brightness. This electron source may be applicable to the development of next-generation field emission electron microscopes with higher spatial and energy resolution — potentially valuable tools in the semiconductor and medical fields.

This project was carried out by a team of NIMS researchers (Han Zhang, Cretu Ovidiu, Koji Kimoto, Takeshi Kasaya, Hideki T. Miyazaki, Naohito Tsujii, Hongxin Wang, Yasushi Yamauchi and Daisuke Fujita) and JEOL researchers (Yu Jimbo, Akira Niwata, Akihiro Ikeda, Akira Yasuhara, Shin-ichi Kitamura and Hironobu Manabe).

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Materials provided by National Institute for Materials Science, Japan. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

In experiments at Washington State University, scientists have developed a technique to see these matter wave caustics by placing attractive or repulsive obstacles in the path of a cold atom laser. The results are curving cusps or folds, upward or downward “V” shapes, which the researchers describe in a paper for Nature Communications.

While it is foundational research, these caustics have potential applications for highly precise measurement or timing devices such as interferometers and atomic clocks.

“It’s a beautiful demonstration of how we can manipulate matter waves in a way that is very similar to how one would manipulate light,” said Peter Engels, WSU Yount distinguished professor and the paper’s senior author. “An atom is accelerated by gravity, so therefore, we can mimic effects that would be very difficult to see with light. Also, since atoms respond to many different things, we can potentially exploit this for new types of sensors that are particularly good at detecting magnetic fields, gradients in electric fields or in gravity.”

To achieve these effects, first the scientists had to create one of the coldest places on Earth, which they were able to accomplish in the Fundamental Quantum Physics lab at WSU. Engels and his colleagues used optical lasers to take energy out of an atomic cloud trapped inside a vacuum chamber, cooling it very close to absolute zero (?273.15 degrees Celsius or ?459.67 degrees Fahrenheit).

This extreme cold makes atoms behave quantum mechanically in ways very different from the familiar laws of nature. In these conditions, instead of behaving like particles of matter, the atoms move like waves. Clouds formed of such atoms are known as Bose-Einstein condensates, named after the theorists whose work first predicted this state of matter, Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose.

In the process of exploring these condensates, the researchers at WSU created a cold atom laser, meaning the wave-like atoms started lining up in a column and moving together.

“A light laser is a collimated, coherent stream of photons, and we’re essentially doing that with atoms,” said Maren Mossman, the paper’s first author who worked on the project as a WSU post-doctoral fellow and is now the Clare Boothe Luce assistant professor of physics at the University of San Diego. “The atoms sort of walk together and behave as one object. So then, we decided to see what happens if we poked this.”

For this study, the researchers ‘poked’ at the atom laser by putting optical obstacles in its path, essentially shining specific wavelengths of laser lights onto the accelerating stream of atoms. One obstacle type repelled the atoms and made caustics in downward fold shapes; another attracted them making caustics in upward cusp shapes.

The system is also very tunable, the researchers said, meaning they can change how fast the atoms accelerate.

“Caustics in atom lasers have never really been studied with this flexibility,” said Engels.

In addition to Engels and Mossman, the co-authors include Michael Forbes, WSU associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Thomas Bersano, a former WSU post-doctoral fellow now at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

This study was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation.

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Materials provided by Washington State University. Original written by Sara Zaske. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Rooftop photovoltaics (PVs) integrated with electric vehicles (EVs) has the potential to deeply decarbonize urban energy systems in a cost-effective way. The SolarEV City Concept suggested that the rooftop PV plus EV systems can supply 54-95% of electricity demand within cities in Japan, reducing CO₂ emission 54-95% (Kobashi et al., Environmental Research Letters, 16, 024042,2021). However, it was not clear which district in city could consume, generate, and store the PV electricity, as each district has different load patterns, building structures, and number of parked cars. Therefore, we performed techno-economic analyses on rooftop PV systems integrated with stand-alone batteries or EVs in residential and commercial districts in Japan from 2020 to 2040.

We found that rooftop PV systems in 2020 are already cost competitive relative to existing energy systems in Japan. However, “PV + EV” systems in residential houses rapidly increases its economic advantage over commercial districts due to greater rooftop space and higher number of available vehicles towards 2030. Moreover, energy sharing in the districts significantly improved the decarbonization potential. By 2025, energy cost savings, payback periods, and internal rate of return (IRR) of residential “PV + EV” systems respectively reached 23%, 9 years, and 11%, and continued improving in subsequent years. CO₂ emissions from electricity and gasoline consumption was reduced by 88%, and the system was capable to supplying 89% of electricity demand.

The results indicate that residential “PV + EV” systems are a potential source for significant renewable energy generation and storage that can also produce increasingly dispatchable electricity. Policy makers, industries, and communities should prepare to establish these systems through regulatory reform and demonstration projects to scale-up after 2025.

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Materials provided by National Institute for Environmental Studies. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.