During the AIP Publishing Horizons — Energy Storage and Conversion virtual conference, which will be held Aug. 4-6, Cátia Rodrigues, from the University of Porto, will discuss the prospects of using power generators in the ocean to address the energy concerns of marine exploration. The presentation, “Performance of triboelectric nanogenerators based on rolling spheres motion under realistic water waves conditions,” will be available during the three-day conference.

Traditionally used energy harvesting technologies, like photovoltaic panels or wind turbines, suffer from several limitations — critically, their intermittency and inability to maintain continuous operation. In the absence of daylight and wind, neither of the two can supply any power.

In the case of ocean buoys, a potential solution is omnipresent: wave energy. Abundant, predictable, and consistent, the ocean’s own waves can be used to power navigation buoys.

“Even so, the development of wave energy converters has not yet reached its full potential due to the lack of technological consensus, uncompetitive energy generation costs, and the irregular and low-frequency nature of waves at sea,” said Rodrigues.

The team developed sphere-based triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) — devices that convert mechanical motion into electrical power — that can be incorporated directly into navigational buoys to provide electricity from ocean waves.

When testing the TENGs on a 1:8 scale in real conditions, they determined maximum voltages can be generated when waves occur at heights of 0.1 meters approximately every 2.6 seconds — close to the natural period of the buoy. Even when waves are inconsistent and slow, the energy conversion efficiency of the TENGs is much larger than standard generators.

“Concerning wave energy, some relevant challenges still exist to the viable deployment of conversion technologies, mostly linked to the irregular nature of waves and the distribution of energy in both direction and frequency,” Rodrigues said.

The group plans to deploy a prototype in Figueira da Foz, a seaport in Portugal.

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In clinical practice, the bodily distribution of chronic pain is often used in conjunction with other signs and symptoms to diagnose and treat patients. Recent work on fibromyalgia has revealed that clinical pain syndromes thought to be distinct entities may share clinically-relevant features, especially regarding the impact of pain distribution on outcomes. However patterns of pain distribution have not been previously examined in a systematic way as predictors of pain characteristics or outcomes.

In the new study, researchers analyzed data on 21,658 patients seen at the seven pain management clinics of the University of Pittsburgh between 2016 and 2019. All patients completed a pain body map, in which areas of pain are selected on two side-by-side drawings of the front and back of the body, with 74 possible regions of pain. Other information on patients’ pain, health, and outcomes was available in the electronic medical record. Patients were 83% white, 60% female, 22% insured by Medicaid and 10% had at least one comorbidity.

Data from all patients revealed 9 distinct groupings of pain distribution. Demographic and medical characteristics, pain intensity, pain impact, and neuropathic pain quality all varied significantly across cluster subgroups. For instance, the pain intensity of the “Neck and Shoulder” group was less than that of “Lower Back Pain below knee” and “Neck, Shoulder and Lower Back Pain,” while the group with the highest pain intensity consisted of patients with widespread heavy pain, also associated with low physical function, high anxiety and depression and high sleep disturbance. In a subset of 7,138 patients who completed 3-month follow-up questionnaires, subgroups predicted the likelihood of improvement in pain and physical function; those in the “Abdominal Pain” group were the most improved, with 49% self-reporting clinically significant improvements, while those in the “Neck, Shoulder and Lower Back Pain” group were the least improved, with only 37% reporting improvements. The authors conclude that algorithmic clustering by pain distribution may, in the future, be an important facet of the personalization of pain management.

The authors add: “Using an algorithmic approach, we found that how a patient reports the bodily distribution of their chronic pain affects nearly all aspects of the pain experience, including what happens three months later. This emphasizes that chronic pain is a disease process and suggests that this facet of the chronic pain phenotype will be important for future developments in diagnosis and personalized pain management.”

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“The science is rapidly advancing in the area of epigenetics — modifications to our DNA that are often environmentally driven and have the potential to serve as early warning sign for disease,” says Ana Navas-Acien, MD, PhD, the study’s first author and professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. “In this study, we harness the country’s best clinical data on heart disease from diverse populations to begin to unlock the specific epigenetic changes involved the complex biology that leads to disease. Ultimately, we hope the research will allow us to identify and prevent disease before the worst damage takes place, although developing appropriate DNA methylation tests is still years away.”

The researchers began their analysis with data from the Strong Heart Study, the largest study of cardiovascular disease in American Indians, conducted in partnership with communities across the Great Plains and the Southwest since 1988. They analyzed blood samples to identify specific locations on DNA where methylation activity was associated with incidents of coronary heart disease, including heart attack and coronary deaths (methylation can change the activity of a DNA segment without changing the genetic sequence).

“The use of high-dimensional statistical methods allowed us to study methylation in hundreds of thousands specific locations in the DNA at the same time” says Arce Domingo-Relloso, MSc, data scientist and study co-author leading the statistical analyses for this project.

The researchers then took the same approach with four other major heart disease cohorts: Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (divided into Black and white cohorts due to differences in timing and laboratory methods), Framingham Heart Study, and Women’s Health Initiative. In all, they examined more than 400,000 DNA locations and 1,894 coronary heart disease events.

In the initial analysis of Strong Heart data, they identified 506 epigenetic marks linked to cardiovascular risk. Of these, 33 were also linked to cardiovascular risk in three or more of the other cohorts, although some of these sites were associated with higher risk of disease in one cohort but with lower risk of disease in other cohorts. Among the 33 methylation sites are those previously linked to cardiovascular risk and smoking, as well as novel sites that the researchers say are worthy of future investigation. Further analysis of the commonalities between the 33 marks found that many of them are connected with EGFR gene, which is involved in cell growth and cell survival.

“The overlap of these methylation sites across diverse cohorts supports the idea of interconnected biological pathways for cardiovascular risk,” says Yuling Hong, MD, PhD, chief of the epidemiology branch within the Division of Cardiovascular Sciences at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. “The more we understand about early risk for cardiovascular disease the better we may be able to prevent illness, particularly in populations such as American Indians with relatively high risk for heart disease.”

The study’s senior author is Shelley A. Cole, PhD, of the Texas Biomedical Research Institute. A full list of authors is available on the journal’s article page.

The Strong Heart Study was supported by grants for the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) (contract numbers: 75N92019D00027, 75N92019D00028, 75N92019D00029, 75N92019D00030) and previous grants (HL090863, HL109315, HL109301, HL109284, HL109282, HL109319) and cooperative agreements (HL41642, HL41652, HL41654, HL65520, HL65521) and by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (ES021367, ES025216, ES010349, ES009089). The Framingham Heart Study acknowledges the support of contracts NO1-HC-25195, HHSN268201500001I and 75N92019D00031 from the NHLBI and grant supplement HL092577-06S1 for this research. The Women’s Health Initiative is funded by the NHLBI, National Institutes of Health (NIH), and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) through contracts N268201600018C, N268201600001C, N268201600002C, N268201600003C, and N268201600004C. The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities study has been funded in whole or in part with funds from the NHLBI, NIH, HHS (contract numbers HHSN268201700001I, HHSN268201700002I, N268201700003I, N268201700004I, N268201700005I). Funding was also supported by 5RC2HL102419 and NS087541. Investigator-specific funding is available on the journal’s article page. Navas-Acien and several other authors receive funding from the NHLBI and NIEHS.

Recently, a pair of NASA studies identified the most likely locations to find pieces of mantle on the surface, providing a map for future lunar sample return missions such as those under NASA’s Artemis program. If collected and analyzed, these fragments from deep within the Moon can provide a better understanding of how the Moon, the Earth, and many other solar system worlds evolved.

“This is the most up-to-date evaluation of the evolution of the lunar interior, synthesizing numerous recent developments to paint a new picture of the history of the mantle and how and where it may have been exposed on the lunar surface,” said Daniel Moriarty of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland and the University of Maryland, College Park.

Magma oceans evolve as they cool down and dense materials sink while light materials rise. The formation of magma oceans and their evolution are thought to be common processes among rocky planets and moons throughout our solar system and beyond. Earth’s Moon is the most accessible and well-preserved body to study these fundamental processes.

“Understanding these processes in more detail will have implications for important follow-up questions: How does this early heating affect the distribution of water and atmospheric gases of a planet? Does water stick around, or is it all boiled away? What are the implications for early habitability and the genesis of life?” adds Moriarty, lead author of the papers, published August 3 in Nature Communications and January 2021 in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Large rocky objects such as planets, moons, and large asteroids can form magma oceans with the heat generated as they grow. Our solar system formed from a cloud of gas and dust that collapsed under its own gravity. As this happened, dust grains smacked into each other and stuck together, and over time this process snowballed into larger and larger conglomerations, eventually forming asteroid and planet-sized bodies. These collisions generated a tremendous amount of heat. Also, the building blocks of our solar system contained a variety of radioactive elements, which released heat as they decayed. In larger objects, both processes can release enough heat to form magma oceans.

However, the details of how magma oceans evolve as they cool and how the various minerals in them crystalize are uncertain, which affects what scientists think mantle rocks may look like and where they could be found on the surface.

“The bottom line is that the evolution of the lunar mantle is more complicated than originally thought,” said Moriarty. “Some minerals that crystallize and sink early are less dense than minerals that crystallize and sink later. This leads to an unstable situation with light material near the bottom of the mantle trying to rise while heavier material closer to the top descends. This process, called ‘gravitational overturn’, does not proceed in a neat and orderly fashion, but becomes messy, with lots of mixing and unexpected stragglers left behind.”

The team reviewed the most recent laboratory experiments, lunar sample analysis, and geophysical and geochemical models to develop their new understanding of how the lunar mantle evolved as it cooled and solidified. They used this new understanding as a lens to interpret recent observations of the lunar surface from NASA’s Lunar Prospector and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, and NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument on board India’s Chandrayaan-I spacecraft. The team generated a map of likely mantle locations using Moon Mineralogy Mapper data to assess mineral composition and abundance, integrated with Lunar Prospector observations of elemental abundances, including markers of the last remaining liquid at the end of lunar magma ocean crystallization, and imagery and topography data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

At around 1,600 miles (about 2,600 kilometers) across, the South Pole — Aitken basin is the largest confirmed impact structure on the Moon, and therefore is associated with the deepest depth of excavation of all lunar basins, so it’s the most likely place to find pieces of mantle, according to the team.

For years, scientists have been puzzled by a radioactive anomaly in the northwest quadrant of the South Pole — Aitken Basin on the lunar farside. The team’s analysis demonstrates that the composition of this anomaly is consistent with the “sludge” that forms in the uppermost mantle at the very end of magma ocean crystallization. Because this sludge is very dense, scientists have previously assumed that it should completely sink into the lower mantle early in lunar history.

“However, our more nuanced understanding from recent models and experiments indicates that some of this sludge gets trapped in the upper mantle, and later excavated by this vast impact basin,” said Moriarty. “Therefore, this northwest region of the South Pole — Aitken Basin is the best location to access excavated mantle materials currently on the lunar surface. Interestingly, some of these materials may also be present around the proposed Artemis and VIPER landing sites around the lunar South Pole.”