Amid growing global concern over climate change and plastic pollution, researchers at Osaka Metropolitan University are making great strides in the sustainable production of fumaric acid — a component of biodegradable plastics such as polybutylene succinate, which is commonly used for food packaging. The researchers have managed to efficiently produce fumaric acid, which is traditionally derived from petroleum, using renewable resources, carbon dioxide, and biomass-derived compounds.

In a previous study, a research team led by Professor Yutaka Amao of the Research Center for Artificial Photosynthesis at Osaka Metropolitan University demonstrated the synthesis of fumaric acid from bicarbonate and pyruvic acid, a biomass-derived compound, using solar energy. They also succeeded in producing fumaric acid using carbon dioxide obtained directly from the gas phase as a raw material. However, the yield in the production of fumaric acid remained low.

In their latest research, published in Dalton Transactions, the researchers have now developed a new photosensitizer and further advanced an artificial photosynthesis technique that doubles the yield of fumaric acid compared to conventional methods.

“This is an extremely important advancement for the complex bio/photocatalyst system. It is a valuable step forward in our quest to synthesize fumaric acid from renewable energy sources with even higher yields, steering us toward a more sustainable future,” said Professor Amao.

The discovery has led the team led by Dr Valentina Rossi of University College Cork, Ireland (UCC) to urge caution in how the fossil is used in future research.

Tridentinosaurus antiquus was discovered in the Italian alps in 1931 and was thought to be an important specimen for understanding early reptile evolution.

Its body outline, appearing dark against the surrounding rock, was initially interpreted as preserved soft tissues. This led to its classification as a member of the reptile group Protorosauria.

However, this new research, published in the scientific journal Palaeontology, reveals that the fossil renowned for its remarkable preservation is mostly just black paint on a carved lizard-shaped rock surface.

The purported fossilised skin had been celebrated in articles and books but never studied in detail. The somewhat strange preservation of the fossil had left many experts uncertain about what group of reptiles this strange lizard-like animal belonged to and more generally its geological history.

Dr Rossi, of UCC’s School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, said:

“Fossil soft tissues are rare, but when found in a fossil they can reveal important biological information, for instance, the external colouration, internal anatomy and physiology.

“The answer to all our questions was right in front of us, we had to study this fossil specimen in details to reveal its secrets — even those that perhaps we did not want to know.”

The microscopic analysis showed that the texture and composition of the material did not match that of genuine fossilised soft tissues.

Preliminary investigation using UV photography revealed that the entirety of the specimen was treated with some sort of coating material. Coating fossils with varnishes and/or lacquers was the norm in the past and sometimes is still necessary to preserve a fossil specimen in museum cabinets and exhibits. The team was hoping that beneath the coating layer, the original soft tissues were still in good condition to extract meaningful palaeobiological information.

The findings indicate that the body outline of Tridentinosaurus antiquus was artificially created, likely to enhance the appearance of the fossil. This deception misled previous researchers, and now caution is being urged when using this specimen in future studies.

The team behind this research includes contributors based in Italy at the University of Padua, Museum of Nature South Tyrol, and the Museo delle Scienze in Trento.

Co-author Prof Evelyn Kustatscher, coordinator of the project “Living with the supervolcano,” funded by the Autonomous Province of Bolzano said:

“The peculiar preservation of Tridentinosaurus had puzzled experts for decades. Now, it all makes sense. What it was described as carbonized skin, is just paint.”

However all not all is lost, and the fossil is not a complete fake. The bones of the hindlimbs, in particular, the femurs seem genuine, although poorly preserved. Moreover, the new analyses have shown the presence of tiny bony scales called osteoderms — like the scales of crocodiles — on what perhaps was the back of the animal.

This study is an example of how modern analytical palaeontology and rigorous scientific methods can resolve an almost century-old palaeontological enigma.

The path to a better understanding of which genes and mechanisms control male fertility therefore lies via suitable laboratory animals — in this case, bulls.

A research team led by Hubert Pausch, Professor of Animal Genomics at ETH Zurich, studied young bulls to investigate in detail which genes are active in different tissues of the animals’ reproductive organs and how this affects their fertility. Their study was recently published in the journal Nature Communications.

For this investigation, the researchers from the Institute of Agricultural Sciences used samples of testicles, epididymis and vas deferens from 118 freshly slaughtered bulls of reproductive age. The animals were not killed specifically for the research.

One thing the scientists characterised using these biopsies was the bulls’ transcriptomes — in other words, all the messenger RNAs present in each kind of tissue, which represent the gene transcripts. This enabled the team to find out which genes are active in which of the three tissues. Based on that knowledge, they created corresponding transcriptome profiles for the bulls. They then compared these profiles with those of humans and mice.

Many genes involved

Through this research, the team discovered a large number of genes and their variants that are associated with fertility in bulls. Most of the genes found are also likely to be relevant to male fertility in humans. In evolutionary terms, the regulation of male fertility is “highly conserved,” Xena Mapel, first author of the study explains. This means that the genes responsible for reproduction function similarly across mammals.

“These genes are closely linked to poor fertility in bulls,” Mapel says. “Such subfertile bulls don’t show up during conventional ejaculate screening. However, they can be reliably detected with our new marker genes.”

Unusual animal model

Although cattle are an unusual choice of animal model, they are ideal for such studies. For one thing, the genes of breeding bulls are well understood, and for another, breeding organisations obtain ejaculate from the animals twice a week as part of normal operations. This is analysed in detail before being diluted and used to inseminate hundreds of cows — or is discarded if the quality of the ejaculate is poor.

The bull cohort analysed here also has the great advantage that all the animals are similar in age. “This cohort is very homogeneous. If we had to carry out a comparable study on men, we’d have to rely on voluntary donors, potentially across all possible age groups. This would give us data that’s very difficult to compare.”

Data on the fertility of young men is collected annually from Swiss recruits to the armed forces, but this can hardly be used for such analyses. “We don’t know what influences the men were exposed to before they took the fertility test, which will be different for every test subject. Furthermore, it’s practically impossible to obtain tissue samples from their reproductive tract, as that would entail an invasive medical procedure.”

Findings to benefit livestock breeders

It is still unclear how the new findings will be incorporated into human fertility research, but they are already paving the way for better diagnostics with which to identify the corresponding genes and their variants in breeding bulls. That means livestock breeders will likely be the first to benefit from the findings, since they will help to minimise financial losses from failed artificial inseminations.

Currently, every bull’s ejaculate is tested for quality before use and the calves’ genomes are analysed; however, some infertile bulls still slip through. If a breeder inseminates cows with semen from an infertile bull, the cows will not become pregnant. And with each insemination costing 80 Swiss francs, that can soon eat up a breeder’s budget: a typical Swiss dairy farm spends several thousand Swiss francs a year on artificially inseminating its herd of cows. But it doesn’t end there: the unsuccessfully inseminated cows often cause further problems to the farmers, as they don’t give birth to calves and no longer produce milk, meaning the farmer has to replace them. And that costs money.

Artificial insemination is now standard in beef and dairy cattle husbandry, and also in pig breeding. In Switzerland, around 800,000 cows are artificially inseminated every year. Natural matings — when a bull mates with a cow naturally — take place only very rarely. “Raising a bull isn’t easy. Most farmers don’t have the space for such a large animal,” Pausch says.

“Creating useful quantum computers and quantum simulators is one of the most important and debated topics in quantum science today, with the potential to revolutionise society,” says researcher Natalia Chepiga. Quantum simulators are a type of quantum computer, Chepiga explains: “Quantum simulators are meant to address open problems of quantum physics to further push our understanding of nature. Quantum computers will have wide applications in various areas of social life, for example in finances, encryption and data storage.”

Steering wheel

“A key ingredient of a useful quantum simulator is a possibility to control or manipulate it,” says Chepiga. “Imagine a car without a steering wheel. It can only go forward but cannot turn. Is it useful? Only if you need to go in one particular direction, otherwise the answer will be ‘no!’. If we want to create a quantum computer that will be able to discover new physics phenomena in the near-future, we need to build a ‘steering wheel’ to tune into what seems interesting. In my paper I propose a protocol that creates a fully controllable quantum simulator.”

Recipe

The protocol is a recipe — a set of ingredients that a quantum simulator should have to be tunable. In the conventional setup of a quantum simulator, rubidium (Rb) or cesium (Cs) atoms are targeted by a single laser. As a result, these particles will take up electrons, and thereby become more energetic; they become excited. “I show that if we were to use two lasers with different frequencies or colours, thereby exciting these atoms to different states, we could tune the quantum simulators to many different settings,” Chepiga explains.

The protocol offers an additional dimension of what can be simulated. “Imagine that you have only seen a cube as a sketch on a flat piece of paper, but now you get a real 3D cube that you can touch, rotate and explore in different ways,” Chepiga continues. “Theoretically we can add even more dimensions by bringing in more lasers.”

Simulating many particles

“The collective behaviour of a quantum system with many particles is extremely challenging to simulate,” Chepiga explains. “Beyond a few dozens of particles, modelling with our usual computer or a supercomputer has to rely on approximations.” When taking the interaction of more particles, temperature and motion into account, there are simply too many calculations to perform for the computer.

Quantum simulators are composed of quantum particles, which means that the components are entangled. “Entanglement is some sort of mutual information that quantum particles share between themselves. It is an intrinsic property of the simulator and therefore allows to overcome this computational bottleneck.”

Quantum processors based on two-dimensional arrays of optical tweezers, which are created using focussed laser beams, are one of the most promising technologies for developing quantum computing and simulation that will enable highly beneficial applications in the future. A diverse range of applications from drug development through to optimising traffic flows will benefit from this technology.

These processors have been able to hold several hundred single-atom quantum systems up to now, whereby each atom represents one quantum bit or qubit as the basic unit of quantum information. In order to make further advances, it is necessary to increase the number of qubits in the processors. This has now been achieved by a team headed by Professor Gerhard Birkl from the “Atoms — Photons — Quanta” research group in the Department of Physics at TU Darmstadt.

In a research article, which was first published at the beginning of October 2023 on the arXiv preprint server and has now also been published following scientific peer review in the journal OPTICA, the team reports on the world’s first successful experiment to realise a quantum-processing architecture that contains more than 1,000 atomic qubits in one single plane.

“We are extremely pleased that we were the first to break the mark of 1,000 individually controllable atomic qubits because so many other outstanding competitors are hot on our heels,” says Birkl about their results.

The researchers were able to demonstrate in their experiments that their approach of combining the latest quantum-optical methods with advanced micro-optical technology has enabled them to significantly increase the current limits on the accessible number of qubits.

This was achieved by introducing the novel method of “quantum bit supercharging.” It allowed them to overcome the restrictions imposed on the number of usable qubits by the limited performance of the lasers. 1305 single-atom qubits were loaded in a quantum array with 3,000 trap sites and reassembled into defect-free target structures with up to 441 qubits. By using several laser sources in parallel, this concept has broken through the technological boundaries that had been perceived as being almost insurmountable up to now.

For many different applications, 1,000 qubits is seen as the threshold value from which the boost to efficiency promised by quantum computers can now be demonstrated for the first time. Researchers around the world have thus been working intensively to be the first to break this threshold. The recently published research work demonstrates that for atomic qubits this breakthrough was achieved for the first time worldwide by the research group headed by Professor Birkl. The scientific publication also describes how further increases in the number of laser sources will enable qubit numbers of 10,000 and more in just a few years.

“We see some interesting signs of hot times in cool places,” said SwRI’s Dr. Christopher Glein, an expert in planetary geochemistry and lead author of a paper about this discovery. “I came into this project thinking that large Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) should have ancient surfaces populated by materials inherited from the primordial solar nebula, as their cold surfaces can preserve volatiles like methane. Instead, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) gave us a surprise! We found evidence pointing to thermal processes producing methane from within Eris and Makemake.

The Kuiper Belt is a vast donut-shaped region of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune at the edge of the solar system. Eris and Makemake are comparable in size to Pluto and its moon Charon. These bodies likely formed early in the history of our solar system, about 4.5 billion years ago. Far from the heat of our Sun, KBOs were believed to be cold, dead objects. Newly published work from JWST studies made the first observations of isotopic molecules on the surfaces of Eris and Makemake. These so-called isotopologues are molecules that contain atoms having a different number of neutrons. They provide data that are useful in understanding planetary evolution.

The JWST team measured the composition of the dwarf planets’ surfaces, particularly the deuterium (heavy hydrogen, D) to hydrogen (H) ratio in methane. Deuterium is believed to have formed in the Big Bang, and hydrogen is the most abundant nucleus in the universe. The D/H ratio on a planetary body yields information about the origin, geologic history and formation pathways of compounds containing hydrogen.

“The moderate D/H ratio we observed with JWST belies the presence of primordial methane on an ancient surface. Primordial methane would have a much higher D/H ratio,” Glein said. “Instead, the D/H ratio points to geochemical origins for methane produced in the deep interior. The D/H ratio is like a window. We can use it in a sense to peer into the subsurface. Our data suggest elevated temperatures in the rocky cores of these worlds so that methane can be cooked up. Molecular nitrogen (N₂) could be produced as well, and we see it on Eris. Hot cores could also point to potential sources of liquid water beneath their icy surfaces.”

Over the past two decades, scientists have learned that icy worlds can be much more internally evolved than once believed. Evidence for subsurface oceans has been found at several icy moons such as Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Jupiter’s moon Europa. Liquid water is one of the key ingredients in determining potential planetary habitability. The possibility of water oceans inside Eris and Makemake is something that scientists are going to study in the years ahead. If either of them is habitable, then it would become the most distant world in the solar system that could possibly support life. Finding chemical indicators of internally driven processes takes them a step in this direction.

“If Eris and Makemake hosted, or perhaps could still host warm, or even hot, geochemistry in their rocky cores, cryovolcanic processes could then deliver methane to the surfaces of these planets, perhaps in geologically recent times,” said Dr. Will Grundy, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory, one of Glein’s co-authors and lead author of a companion paper. “We found a carbon isotope ratio (¹³C/¹²C) that suggests relatively recent resurfacing.”

This work is part of a paradigm shift in planetary science. It is increasingly being recognized that cold, icy worlds may be warm at heart. Models developed for this study additionally point to the formation of geothermal gases on Saturn’s moon Titan, which also has abundant methane. Furthermore, the inference of unexpected activity on Eris and Makemake underscores the importance of internal processes in shaping what we see on large KBOs and is consistent with findings at Pluto.

“After the New Horizons flyby of the Pluto system, and with this discovery, the Kuiper Belt is turning out to be much more alive in terms of hosting dynamic worlds than we would have imagined,” said Glein. “It’s not too early to start thinking about sending a spacecraft to fly by another one of these bodies to place the JWST data into a geologic context. I believe that we will be stunned by the wonders that await!”

In a paper published Jan. 11 by Nature Nanotechnology, Biomedical Engineering Professor Ke Cheng and his research group demonstrate that using nanobubbles, called exosomes, through an inhalation treatment method can directly deliver IL-12 messenger RNA (mRNA) to the lungs. mRNAs are the blueprints for producing specific proteins that participate in a variety of cellular functions. While scientists have previously used liposomes (tiny fat-based particles) or lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) to deliver mRNA, this method has several problems, including a lack of tissue homing, where the particles do not go to the target organs, and concerns about the potential toxicity after long-term exposure. Over the past 15 years, Cheng’s group has been developing exosomes for use as superior drug delivery carriers over liposomes and LNPs in specific indications.

New approach

Up to now, clinicians have only been able to use IL-12 to treat cancer by injecting it directly into the tumor or into the bloodstream. Cheng’s lab found that having the patient — in this case, mice — inhale IL-12 mRNA in exosomes could not only deliver locally concentrated IL-12 into the lungs but also could better fight the cancer with minimal side effects. The inhalation method is more efficient in building higher concentrations of IL-12 right where it is needed than other ways of delivering mRNA such as using liposomes.

“Exosomes are usually injected systemically into the bloodstream,” said Cheng. “In this new study, we show that inhaled exosomes can efficiently reach the lung and deliver an anti-lung cancer cargo, IL-12 mRNA. This is a major step forward in advancing the development of new inhalable drugs to treat lung cancer, which has one of the lowest five-year survival rates in the world.”

Turning immune cells into powerful defenders

Inhaling the nanobubbles with the IL-12 blueprint can kickstart the lung immune cells, turning them into powerful defenders equipped to release substances that directly target and destroy tumor cells. In addition, IL-12 helps train these immune cells to “remember” the unique features of tumor cells. As a result, if the tumor tries to attack again, these well-informed immune cells are ready to recognize and eliminate the tumor swiftly. Additionally, these supercharged immune cells can spread their newfound knowledge to other, untrained immune cells throughout the body, creating an army of defenders. This means that even if tumor cells try to spread beyond their original location, like the lungs, these prepared immune cells can spot and wipe them out, offering a body-wide defense system against cancer.The mice that inhaled this therapy demonstrated lung tumor suppression as well as heightened resistance against tumor re-challenges.

Combining efficacy with simplicity

This strategy stands out as a potent IL-12 mRNA delivery system to the lung microenvironment, say the researchers, and combines simplicity with efficacy against primary tumors and metastases. Compared to other nanoparticle controls, exosomes boost IL-12 expression with mitigated toxicity. And patients are likely to be much happier with simply inhaling the therapeutic rather than receiving intratumoral injections.

Next steps

Cheng’s group is now working with Columbia University Irving Medical Center oncologists to translate their results into the clinic to benefit lung cancer patients.

The audio signals in online meetings and auditoriums that are not properly designed often have an echo lagging at least 100 milliseconds from the original speech. These echoes heavily distort speech, interfering with slowly varying sound features most important for understanding conversations, yet people still reliably understand echoic speech. To better understand how the brain enables this, the authors used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to record neural activity while human participants listened to a story with and without an echo. They compared the neural signals to two computational models: one simulating the brain adapting to the echo, and another simulating the brain separating the echo from the original speech.

Participants understood the story with over 95% accuracy, regardless of echo. The researchers observed that cortical activity tracks energy changes related to direct speech, despite the strong interference of the echo. Simulating neural adaptation only partially captured the brain response they observed — neural activity was better explained by a model that split original speech and its echo into separate processing streams. This remained true even when participants were told to direct their attention toward a silent film and ignore the story, suggesting that top-down attention isn’t required to mentally separate direct speech and its echo. The researchers state that auditory stream segregation may be important both for singling out a specific speaker in a crowded environment, and for clearly understanding an individual speaker in a reverberant space.

The authors add, “Echoes strongly distort the sound features of speech and create a challenge for automatic speech recognition. The human brain, however, can segregate speech from its echo and achieve reliable recognition of echoic speech.”