“We met the challenge by creating all-new swabs, which were ready and clinically tested in just three weeks,” said Ramy Arnaout, M.D., D.Phil., Associate Professor of Pathology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, and Associate Director of the Clinical Microbiology Laboratories, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC).

“Handling crises successfully requires a different set of skills than the everyday,” said Dr. Arnaout. “Competition and secrecy are out. Cooperation and openness are in. Resolving the swab crisis was a case study in these and other valuable lessons.”

As the first wave of COVID-19 broke out across the United States, BIDMC, which had the largest in-house COVID-19 testing center in Boston, found themselves with only a week’s supply of swabs. “More manufacturing was the only lasting solution,” Dr. Arnaout said. He and his colleagues began reverse engineering swabs, to determine if they could make them from scratch.

Swabs must be engineered to be neither too stiff, nor too flexible, and must be individually packaged and sterile. BIDMC needed around ten thousand a week; the country needed roughly ten million.

The first week, group members floated, shot down, resurrected, and repurposed various ideas, said Dr. Arnaout. Ultimately, the team saw two options: to find a scalable means to assemble swabs, or else to “find a way to make a stripped-down swab in a single go, without the need for assembly.” 3D printing had “advantages in speed of development and in the variety of structures it can make.”

Dr. Arnaout had previously demonstrated that open and collaborative crowdsourcing is a viable route to solving complex computational problems, specifically his work in computational immunology. He put this lesson to work in the COVID crisis.

“We navigated our… networks, letting manufacturers know about the swab crisis and what we needed from them to solve it,” said Arnaout. “We set up a free publicly viewable knowledge base online in the form of a GitHub repository — a type of website usually used by software engineers to collaborate on coding projects — to share everything we knew with everyone who might want to know it. This was critical for lowering the activation energy for anyone who wanted to join the effort… By the end of the first week, prototypes were rolling in.”

Over the course of the second week, the team tested more than 150 prototypes. “We were giving manufacturers feedback and suggestions one day and receiving new prototypes the next,” Dr. Arnaout said. “We put our protocols and results online.”

The team spoke often with BIDMC’s Institutional Review Board, “whose help and quick feedback were indispensable for cutting through red tape,” Dr. Arnaout said. “We put our IRB-approved protocol online as well.” BIDMC’s technology ventures office assured the team that the evaluation and feedback they were providing to manufacturers would not constitute intellectual property, thereby avoiding any haggling over ownership, which could have wasted precious time.”

By the fourth week, the team had validated four prototypes for clinical use. By summer’s end, “millions of the swabs our coalition helped design, vet, and mass-produce had been sold and used for COVID-19 testing” across the United States and in Europe, Dr. Arnaout wrote.

That experience suggested five lessons:

1. Define the mission — “a simple, clear, and concrete unifying goal for the entire team,” said Dr. Arnaout.
2. Establish norms for behavior. At BIDMC, that took place “mostly via conversations, repetition of the main message and personal example,” said Dr. Arnaout. “Conversations often began or ended with an explicit acknowledgment of the temptation to go it alone… and a reminder that we were not going to give in to such temptation.”
3. Leverage expertise. “At BIDMC, the clinical trials office handled paperwork that the investigators would have handled themselves under normal circumstances.”
4. Practice open and clear communication, “by eliminating the friction of gatekeeping access to information,” said Dr. Arnaout.
5. Stay positive.

“Perhaps we all can take the opportunity afforded by this trying time to improve how we meet our everyday challenges,” said Dr. Arnaout. “By doing so, we might find ourselves further along, more capable, and better prepared for when the next crisis inevitably hits.”

Experts in camouflage

Seadragons belong to the family Syngnathidae along with seahorses and pipefishes. Their name refers to the dragon-like shape of their bodies and the spectacular colouring of their special leaf-like skin appendages. They are considered experts in camouflage because of their ability to mimic the appearance of seaweed. Like the other members of the Syngnathidae family, seadragons exhibit special adaptations and behaviours: They have a tube-shaped, toothless mouths, they lack the ventral and pelvic fins and scales typical for fish, but they instead have a bony shell covering their entire bodies.

Dried seahorses are used in traditional Chinese medicine, which has led to many species being highly endangered. They do not swim horizontally, but instead glide slowly through coral reefs and shallow coastal waters, almost vertically — like a horse — with their heads bent downwards. Their prehensile tail can be used to hold on to things. Like other seahorse species, the seadragon males are responsible for protecting the bright pink eggs attached to the outside of their bodies until they hatch.

While sequencing the genome and examining the genetic basis for other external characteristics of seadragons, researchers from five teams from China, Singapore, Japan and Germany focussed their efforts on sex-determination, toothlessness and newly-evolved skin appendages in seadragons. The research team, led by Professor Qiang Lin from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Guangzhou, showed that a series of genes is responsible for this evolutionary development that usually control fin development. The leaf-like skin appendages of the seadragons are thus highly altered fin rays.

Like seahorses, seadragons are also toothless. They use their long snouts to suck in their food, small crustaceans, and swallow them whole. The genome analysis shows that, in the seahorse relatives, too, several genes are missing that contribute to the development of teeth in other fishes as well as in humans. The research team tested the hypothesis about the corresponding scpp5 gene by switching off this gene in zebra fish, a well-researched model organism with pharyngeal teeth. As expected, the mutated fish displayed reduced teeth. The function of the missing gene responsible for tooth loss was thus proven in molecular-biological CRISPR-Cas experiments.

Males care for fertilized eggs

It is also typical that male members of the seahorse family care for fertilized eggs until they hatch. Seahorse males have developed brood pouches, but males of the older seadragon species still carry the sticky eggs visibly on their tails. The females lay the eggs onto this special location on the males’ bodies, and they are then carried around by the male seadragons and thus protected from predators. It is generally more common that male fish care for fertilized eggs rather than females, although this particular form has only evolved in members of the seahorse family.

In this context, the researchers looked for sex-determination mechanisms that were previously unknown in seadragons. On the whole, it is difficult to localize sex-determination in fish, since, for the most part, they do not have special sex chromosomes, like the X and Y chromosomes in mammals. The team found the molecular basis for sex-determination in seadragons to be in the Mullerian hormone, as had previously also been documented for seahorses.

The sequencing of the seadragon genome was completed as part of an additional project in the context of a long-term collaboration between the research teams in Guangzhou and Konstanz. The first publication — on first the seahorse genome — was published by both teams in 2016 in Nature, with a second one with 21 new seahorse genomes appeared this year in Nature Communications. Axel Meyer: “Our research into the genome seeks to derive the corresponding phenotype or “essence” of these animals. We are striving to understand what an animal looks like based on its sequence of genomes and our understanding of the genes’ function. Seadragons are fish that do not look like typical fish at all. They are a particularly fascinating and beautiful species.”

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Now a Northwestern University research team offers a practical way to make ships CO₂ neutral — or even CO₂ negative — with CO₂-capturing solid oxide fuel cells. After “burning” traditional carbon-based fuels, the fuel cell generates concentrated CO₂ that can be stored on-board the ship. From there, the CO₂ can either be sequestered or recycled into a renewable hydrocarbon fuel.

The team presents its analysis in “Viability of vehicles utilizing on-board CO₂ capture,” published today (Aug. 18) in the journal ACS Energy Letters. In the paper, the team looks at various factors, including fuel storage volumes and mass requirements for a wide range of vehicle classes — from light-duty passenger vehicles to tanker ships — and compares onboard CO₂ capture to battery electric and hydrogen fuel cell options.

“It might be harder for people to see onboard CO₂ capture as climate friendly because it uses conventional, carbon-based fuels,” said Northwestern’s Scott A. Barnett, senior author of the study. “People tend to assume hydrogen fuel cells and electric vehicles are more climate friendly. In reality, they often are not. Electricity might come from burning coal, and hydrogen is often produced by natural gas, which generates a lot of CO₂ in the process.”

An expert on solid oxide fuel cells, Barnett is a professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering. He coauthored the paper with Travis Schmauss, a Ph.D. candidate in his research group.

Why batteries aren’t a viable solution

Responsible for producing about a gigaton of CO₂ each year, ships can consume up to 250 tons of fuel per day. While it might seem tempting to replace this massive amount of fuel with batteries, that’s simply not an option.

“Some tanker ships require enough fuel to circumnavigate the globe as a part of their regular multivoyage operation,” Barnett said. “We calculated that the battery pack for a long-range tanker would take up more room than the storage capacity of the ship. A hydrogen fuel tank also would be too large. When it comes to long-range vehicles, carbon-based fuel combined with on-board CO₂ capture is arguably the best way to make these vehicles CO₂ neutral.”

The proposed method also has potential advantages for shorter-range vehicles. Battery electric and hydrogen fuel cells, however, are already being implemented for those vehicle types, so the researchers instead suggest implementing a CO₂-neutral range extender.

Storage solution

To store the CO₂ on board, Barnett’s team has proposed a patent-pending dual-chamber storage tank. One chamber stores a carbon-based fuel. After the fuel cycles through the fuel cell to create energy, the CO₂ byproduct is pressurized and introduced into the second chamber. The partition between the chambers can move — shrinking the fuel chamber as the fuel is used, making space for CO₂ in the other chamber.

“The solid oxide fuel cell is critical because it burns the fuel with pure oxygen, yielding a concentrated CO₂ product that is storable,” Schmauss said. “If we just burned the fuel with air, it would be heavily diluted with nitrogen, yielding too much gas to store. When the concentrated CO₂ is compressed, it can be stored in a volume not much larger than that needed for the fuel, which saves space.”

“This technology really doesn’t have any major hurdles to making it work,” Barnett added. “You just have to replace the fuel tank with the double-chamber tank and add CO₂compressors. And, of course, the infrastructure eventually has to be developed to off-load the CO₂ and either sequester or use it.”

Moving toward net-zero

With this scenario, the researchers say it is possible to make long-range vehicles CO₂ negative. This is possible with bio-fuels, such as ethanol, because the plants used to produce the fuel have consumed CO₂ from the atmosphere. Then, after the vehicle has used the fuel, the captured CO₂ is removed from the ship and sequestered underground or used in producing a renewable fuel. If a vehicle uses a fossil fuel instead of a bio-fuel, then the resulting overall cycle is closer to net-zero.

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The researchers found that immune cells make up about three percent of the total cell population and that they have at least two populations of immune cells that perform functions unique from digestion.

“These findings are important because they show that corals have the cellular capabilities to fight infection and that they have unique cell types that were previously not known,” said Nikki Traylor-Knowles, an assistant professor of marine biology and ecology at the UM Rosenstiel School and co-senior author of the study.

To uncover these specialized immune cells, the researchers exposed foreign particles such as bacteria, fungal antigens, and beads into a cauliflower coral (Pocillopora damicornis) and starlet sea anemone (Nematostella vectensis) in the laboratory. They then used a process, called fluorescence-activated cell sorting, to isolate different cell populations.

They found that specialized cells, known as phagocytic cells, engulfed the foreign particles, while small, fluid-filled structures inside the cells, called phagosomes, worked to destroy the invaders as well as their own damaged cells.

Immune systems in animals provide an important protective defense response to recognize and destroy foreign substances in their tissues.

“We need to have a better understanding of how coral cells perform specialized functions such as fight infections as the climate change crisis drastically reduces global coral reef biomass and diversity worldwide,” said Traylor-Knowles. “Our findings can help in the development of diagnostic tools for assessing coral health.”

Support for the study was provided by seed funding from the University of Miami Research Awards in Natural Sciences and Engineering, National Science Foundation-U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation grants (NSF grant: 1951826, BSF grant: 2019647), the Israel Science Foundation, European Research Council and Human Frontiers Science Program.

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The latest research from Dr. Junpeng Wang, assistant professor in UA’s School of Polymer Science and Polymer Engineering has a solution to reduce such waste and clear a scientific pathway for a more sustainable future that can appeal to the rubber, tire, automobile and electronics industries. Although this work is supported by UA, Wang recently earned a National Science Foundation CAREER Award that will support future developments from this research.

The problem at hand: Synthetic polymers, including rubber and plastics, are used in nearly every aspect of daily life. The dominance of synthetic polymers is largely driven by their excellent stability and versatile mechanical properties. However, due to their high durability, waste materials composed of these polymers have accumulated in the land and oceans, causing serious concerns for the ecosystem.

In addition, since over 90% of these polymers are derived from finite natural resources, such as petroleum and coal, the production of these materials is unsustainable if they cannot be recycled and reused.

A promising solution to address the challenges in plastics sustainability is to replace current polymers with recyclable ones in order to achieve a circular use of materials. Despite the progress made thus far, few recyclable polymers exhibit the excellent thermal stability and high-performance mechanical properties of traditional polymers. The recyclable materials Wang and his team have developed are unique in the superior thermal stability and versatile mechanical properties. Their article explaining the research, “Olefin Metathesis-Based Chemically Recyclable Polymers Enabled by Fused-Ring Monomers,” was published last week by Nature Chemistry.

“We are particularly interested in chemically recyclable polymers that can be broken down into the constituents (monomers) from which they are made,” says Wang. “The recycled monomers can be reused to produce the polymers, allowing for a circular use of materials, which not only helps to preserve the finite natural resources used in plastics production, but also addresses the issue of unwanted end-of-life accumulation of plastic objects.”

The key in the design of chemically recyclable polymers is to identify the right monomer. Through careful computational calculation, the researchers identified a targeting monomer. They then prepared the monomer and polymers through chemical synthesis, using abundantly available starting materials.

Wang’s research group, including polymer science graduate students and a postdoctoral scientist, aims to address those challenges by developing polymers that can be broken down into their constituent parts. When the catalyst for depolymerization is absent or removed, the polymers will be highly stable and their thermal and mechanical properties can be tuned to meet the needs of various applications.

“The chemically recyclable polymers we developed show excellent thermal stability and robust mechanical properties and can be used to prepare both rubber and plastics,” says Wang. “We expect this material to be an attractive candidate to replace current polymers. Our molecular design is guided by computation, highlighting the transformational power of integrating computation and experimental work. Compared to other recyclable polymers that have been demonstrated, the new polymers we demonstrate show much better stability and more versatile mechanical properties. When a catalyst is added, the polymer can be degraded into the constituent monomer for recycling.”

Next for Wang’s research group is to expand the scope of the chemically recyclable polymers and to develop carbon-fiber reinforced polymer composites. The team will also analyze the economic performance of this industrial process and life-cycle analysis for commercialization of the polymers.

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“Previous literature has looked at [urban scaling] through a lens of homogeneity,” says Santa Fe Institute (SFI) Omidyar Fellow Vicky Chuqiao Yang, an author on the study. These studies have shown a per-capita increase in wealth as cities grow. “But we know from other literature, especially in economics, that many societies are unequal and economic outputs are not distributed evenly.”

Using data from municipal areas across the U.S., the authors took another look at urban wealth through a lens of heterogeneity. Breaking the income in their dataset into deciles, the team found that, as cities grow larger, the top ten percent of income earners gain an increasingly large portion of the wealth.

“For a long time, what has often been thought about in urban scaling is the whole system,” says co-author Chris Kempes, also of the Santa Fe Institute along with co-author Geoffrey West. Kempes and West have worked closely together to study scaling relationships in systems from cities to biological organisms.

But it’s not just wealth that tends to increase as cities grow; the cost of living also increases. So, the authors factored in an adjustment for housing prices. With that adjustment, their analysis showed that, as cities get bigger, the housing costs increase at a faster rate than lower-decile income.

“For the lower decile, there is no proportional increase in wealth. So, the city is not increasing economic benefit, but it’s not decreasing it either,” says Kempes. “However, since costs do go up, the experience of the poorest individuals gets worse.”

Across the world, civilization is undergoing rapid urbanization. More than half the world’s humans currently live in urban settings, and in the coming decade, researchers predict the number of megacities — those with 10 million people or more — will quadruple. “There is an urgent need for a quantitative and predictive theory for how larger urban areas affect a wide variety of city features, dynamics, and outcomes,” write the authors.

The questions in this study were initially raised by co-authors Cate Heine, Elisa Heinrich Mora, and Jacob J. Jackson, who together spanned two cohorts of Undergraduate Complexity Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute.

According to West, the new results emphasize that inequality is primarily an urban phenomenon, arising from underlying social dynamics “that desperately need to be addressed.” He speculates that poorer city dwellers are missing out on the increased social interactions that are credited with driving innovation and wealth creation in large metropolises.

“What was a huge surprise in this research was that, as the city grows, there’s no advantage to people in the bottom 10-20th percentiles. As you go down the income deciles, the value-added for city-dwellers got less and less in a systematic way… so much so that, in the bottom decile you get nothing at all. There’s even evidence that you’re losing quality of life,” says West. “Here we found that rich are getting even richer than we thought and the poor are getting even poorer than we thought.”

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