Annabel Wright, 15, had been using Roaccutane in the months before she died, an inquest hears.
Annabel Wright: Family ‘made aware’ of Roaccutane adverse effects
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Category Archives: Mind Building
Covid-19: Life expectancy is down but what does this mean?
Life expectancy for men has fallen because of the Covid pandemic – but what will be the long-term effect?
NHS Scotland’s ‘biggest crisis’ in five charts
Looking at the figures behind the enormous pressures being felt by NHS Scotland
GP appointments in Wales: People facing crisis, says watchdog
By the time Becca Martin’s family got an appointment for her dad, he was so ill he was taken to hospital.
‘Giving birth left me needing a colostomy bag’
Former triathlete Kayleigh Adams endured a fourth-degree tear that led to her needing a colostomy bag.
Is ‘the worst cold ever’ going around?
As more people mix again, the common cold is back – and leaving people floored.
Covid: How can missing five million be persuaded to have the jab?
Headlines have focused on teenagers and booster doses – but millions still haven’t had a first jab.
Sex and the symbiont: Can algae hookups help corals survive?
A little more sexy time for symbionts could help coral reefs survive the trials of climate change. And that, in turn, could help us all.
Researchers at Rice University and the Spanish Institute of Oceanography already knew the importance of algae known as dinoflagellates to the health of coral as the oceans warm, and have now confirmed the tiny creatures not only multiply by splitting in half, but can also reproduce through sex.
That, according to Rice marine biologist Adrienne Correa and graduate student Lauren Howe-Kerr, opens a path toward breeding strains of dinoflagellate symbionts that better serve their coral partners.
Dinoflagellates not only contribute to the stunning color schemes of corals, but critically, they also help feed their hosts by converting sunlight into food.
“Most stony corals cannot survive without their symbionts,” Howe-Kerr said, “and these symbionts have the potential to help corals respond to climate change. These dinoflagellates have generation times of a couple months, while corals might only reproduce once a year.
“So if we can get the symbionts to adapt to new environmental conditions more quickly, they might be able to help the corals survive high temperatures as well, while we all tackle climate change.”
In an open-access study in Nature’s Scientific Reports, they wrote the discovery “sets the stage for investigating environmental triggers” of symbiont sexuality “and can accelerate the assisted evolution of a key coral symbiont in order to combat reef degradation.”
To better understand the algae, the Rice researchers reached out to Rosa Figueroa, a researcher at the Spanish Institute of Oceanography who studies the life cycles of dinoflagellates and is lead author on the study.
“We taught her about the coral-algae system and she taught us about sex in other dinoflagellates, and we formed a collaboration to see if we could detect symbiont sex on reefs,” Howe-Kerr said.
“In genomic datasets of coral dinoflagellates, researchers would see all the genes coral symbionts should need to reproduce sexually, but no one had been able to see the actual cells in the process,” said Correa, an assistant professor of biosciences. “That’s what we got this time.”
The discovery follows sampling at coral reefs in Mo’orea, French Polynesia, in July 2019 and then observation of the algae through advanced confocal microscopes that allow for better viewing of three-dimensional structures.
“This is the first proof that these symbionts, when they’re sequestered in coral cells, reproduce sexually, and we’re excited because this opens the door to finding out what conditions might promote sex and how we can induce it,” Howe-Kerr said. “We want to know how we can leverage that knowledge to create more genetic variation.”
“Because the offspring of dividing algae only inherit DNA from their one parent cell, they are, essentially, clones that don’t generally add to the diversity of a colony. But offspring from sex get DNA from two parents, which allows for more rapid genetic adaptation,” Correa said.
Symbiont populations that become more tolerant of environmental stress through evolution would be of direct benefit to coral, which protect coastlines from both storms and their associated runoff.
“These efforts are ongoing to try to breed corals, symbionts and any other partners to make the most stress-resistant colonies possible,” Correa said. “For coral symbionts, that means growing them under stressful conditions like high temperatures and then propagating the ones that manage to survive.
“After successive generations we’ll select out anything that can’t tolerate these temperatures,” she said. “And now that we can see there’s sex, we can do lots of other experiments to learn what combination of conditions will make sex happen more often in cells. That will produce symbionts with new combinations of genes, and some of those combinations will hopefully correspond to thermotolerance or other traits we want. Then we can seed babies of the coral species that host that symbiont diversity and use those colonies to restore reefs.”
The research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Community Project (DIANAS-CTM2017-86066-R), a Lewis and Clark Grant from the American Philosophical Society, a Wagoner Foreign Study Scholarship, the National Science Foundation (1635798) and an early-career research fellowship from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences (2000009651).
Read the paper at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-98148-9.
This news release can be found online at https://news-network.rice.edu/news/2021/09/22/sex-and-the-symbiont-can-algae-hookups-help-corals-survive/
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.
Related materials:
Algae team rosters could help ID ‘super corals’: https://news.rice.edu/2020/02/12/algae-team-rosters-could-help-id-super-corals/
Houston flooding polluted reefs more than 100 miles offshore: http://news.rice.edu/2021/04/06/houston-flooding-polluted-reefs-more-than-100-miles-offshore-2/
Correa Lab: http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~ac53/index.html
Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences: https://earthscience.rice.edu
Wiess School of Natural Sciences: https://www.rice.edu
Video:
A dinoflagellate tetrad cell that will soon split into four separate cells, captured by Rice University scientists through a confocal microscope. The cell’s four nuclei are depicted in red. Researchers at Rice and in Spain determined from experiments that these symbionts, taken from a coral colony in Mo’orea, French Polynesia, are able to reproduce both through mitosis and via sex. (Credit: Correa Lab/Rice University)
Images for download:
https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2021/09/0927_CORAL-1-WEB.jpg
Rice University’s Lauren Howe-Kerr, left, and Adrienne Correa discovered that symbiont algae found on corals in French Polynesia are able to reproduce via mitosis and sex. That could make it easier to develop algae that better protect coral reefs from the effects of climate change. (Credit: Photo by Brandon Martin/Rice University)
https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2021/09/0927_CORAL-2-WEB.jpg
A coral of the type studied by scientists at Rice University is protected by dinoflagellates (inset), algae that turn sunlight into food to feed and protect reefs. The study showed the algae are able to reproduce via sex, opening a path toward accelerated evolution of strains that can better protect coral from the effects of climate change. (Credit: Inset by Carsten Grupstra/Rice University; coral image by Andrew Thurber/Oregon State University)
https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2021/09/0927_CORAL-3-WEB.jpg
A dinoflagellate tetrad cell that will soon split into four separate cells, captured by Rice University scientists through a confocal microscope. The cell’s four nuclei are depicted in red. Researchers at Rice and in Spain determined from experiments that these symbionts, taken from a coral colony in Mo’orea, French Polynesia, are able to reproduce both through mitosis and via sex. (Credit: Correa Lab/Rice University)
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 4,052 undergraduates and 3,484 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 1 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.
How a city’s design creates congestion
City planners predict that as more people move into urban areas, traffic jams will get worse. That’s why sustainability expert Neil Debbage, an assistant professor in the UTSA College of Liberal and Fine Arts’ Department of Political Science and Geography, proposes a new way to analyze traffic congestion.
Using more precise measures to describe the shape of cities and considering other socioeconomic factors, the model, which was applied to nearly 100 American cities, could lead to a better understanding of the link between congestion and land use.
“Anecdotally, we often hear that more sprawling cities like San Antonio suffer from worse traffic congestion, but we wanted to test this relationship by analyzing a large number of cities with diverse urban forms.”
Previously, indirect metrics, such as population density, job location and the total number of homes within a defined area, were used to estimate traffic congestion. Working alongside with Mingshu Wang, associate professor at the University of Glasgow, a new approach was designed based on the configuration of land use within cities.
The model also used new variables, including the level of intensity of urban land use and congestion type, and control variables, such as median age, total population and the presence of auto commuters to determine their impact on congestion.
The researchers used congestion data from the Urban Mobility Scorecard (UMS) database. This source combines real-time speed data, volume and roadway information from the Federal Highway Administration. Specifically, congestion was defined according to annual excess fuel consumed during rush hours and free-flowing traffic, annual hours of delay during rush hour and off-peak times, and a time travel index based on the ratio between travel time during rush hour divided by the time of the same trip under free-flowing conditions.
This more precise definition of congestion helped Wang and Debbage answer three specific questions: What city type, either those with one dominant urban center or multiple centers, creates more congestion? Which types of urban land use, such as high-intensity or low-intensity, are associated with congestion? What are the relationships between the shape of a city and congestion and how do those links vary depending on the specific type of congestion analyzed?
The UTSA-Glasgow model indicated that cities with more urban land use were associated with higher congestion levels. The researchers’ findings support the long-held belief that traffic congestion is tied to urbanization, but also highlighted that high-intensity urban land use played a more notable role.
The researchers also found that the shape of cities impacted congestion. Cities that had one dominant urban core generally were associated with lower levels of congestion while more polycentric cities, those with multiple urban centers, suffered from more traffic. The study found that the shape of cities had more of an impact on general congestion than traffic just during rush hour periods.
“By analyzing different land use intensities, we were able to identify more precisely what aspects of city shape influence congestion, which can hopefully inform more tailored land use policy responses.”
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Materials provided by University of Texas at San Antonio. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Metals supercharge promising method to bury harmful carbon dioxide under the sea
There’s a global race to reduce the amount of harmful gases in our atmosphere to slow down the pace of climate change, and one way to do that is through carbon capture and sequestration — sucking carbon out of the air and burying it. At this point, however, we’re capturing only a fraction of the carbon needed to make any kind of dent in climate change.
Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin, in partnership with ExxonMobil, have made a new discovery that may go a long way in changing that. They have found a way to supercharge the formation of carbon dioxide-based crystal structures that could someday store billions of tons of carbon under the ocean floor for centuries, if not forever.
“I consider carbon capture as insurance for the planet,” said Vaibhav Bahadur (VB), an associate professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and the lead author of a new paper on the research in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. “It’s not enough anymore to be carbon neutral, we need to be carbon negative to undo damage that has been done to the environment over the past several decades.”
These structures, known as hydrates, form when carbon dioxide is mixed with water at high pressure and low temperature. The water molecules re-orient themselves and act as cages that trap CO2 molecules.
But the process initiates very slowly — it can take hours or even days to get the reaction started. The research team found that by adding magnesium to the reaction, hydrates formed 3,000 times faster than the quickest method in use today, as rapidly as one minute. This is the fastest hydrate formation pace ever documented.
“The state-of-the-art method today is to use chemicals to promote the reaction,” Bahadur said. “It works, but it’s slower, and these chemicals are expensive and not environmentally friendly.”
The hydrates form in reactors. In practice, these reactors could be deployed to the ocean floor. Using existing carbon capture technology, CO2 would be plucked from the air and taken to the underwater reactors where the hydrates would grow. The stability of these hydrates reduces the threat of leaks present in other methods of carbon storage, such as injecting it as a gas into abandoned gas wells.
Figuring out how to reduce carbon in the atmosphere is about as big of a problem as there is in the world right now. And yet, Bahadur says, there are only a few research groups in the world looking at CO2 hydrates as a potential carbon storage option.
“We are only capturing about half of a percent of the amount of carbon that we’ll need to by 2050,” Bahadur said. “This tells me there is plenty of room for more options in the bucket of technologies to capture and store carbon.”
Bahadur has been working on hydrate research since he arrived at UT Austin in 2013. This project is part of a research partnership between ExxonMobil and the Energy Institute at UT Austin.
The researchers and ExxonMobil have filed a patent application to commercialize their discovery. Up next, they plan to tackle issues of efficiency — increasing the amount of CO2 that is converted into hydrates during the reaction — and establishing continuous production of hydrates.
The research was funded by ExxonMobil and a grant from the National Science Foundation. Bahadur led the team, which also includes Filippo Mangolini, an assistant professor in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering. Other team members include: from the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering Aritra Kar, Palash Vadiraj Acharya and Awan Bhati; from Texas Materials Institute at UT Austin Hugo Celio and researchers from ExxonMobil.
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Materials provided by University of Texas at Austin. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
