“Our study is novel because it is the first to use human induced pluripotent stem cells to study the effects of spaceflight on human heart function,” says senior study author Joseph C. Wu of Stanford University School of Medicine. “Microgravity is an environment that is not very well understood, in terms of its overall effect on the human body, and studies like this could help shed light on how the cells of the body behave in space, especially as the world embarks on more and longer space missions such as going to the moon and Mars.”

Past studies have shown that spaceflight induces physiological changes in cardiac function, including reduced heart rate, lowered arterial pressure, and increased cardiac output. But to date, most cardiovascular microgravity physiology studies have been conducted either in non-human models or at tissue, organ, or systemic levels. Relatively little is known about the role of microgravity in influencing human cardiac function at the cellular level.

To address this question, Wu and his collaborators (including graduate student Alexa Wnorowski, former Stanford graduate student Arun Sharma, now a research fellow at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, and former Stanford graduate student turned astronaut Kathleen Rubins) studied human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs). They generated hiPSC lines from three individuals by reprogramming blood cells, and then differentiated them into hiPSC-CMs.

Beating hiPSC-CMs were then launched to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX spacecraft as part of a commercial resupply service mission. Simultaneously, ground control hiPSC-CMs were cultured on Earth for comparison purposes.

Upon return to Earth, space-flown hiPSC-CMs showed normal structure and morphology. However, they did adapt by modifying their beating pattern and calcium recycling patterns.

In addition, the researchers performed RNA sequencing of hiPSC-CMs harvested at 4.5 weeks aboard the International Space Station, and 10 days after returning to Earth. These results showed that 2,635 genes were differentially expressed among flight, post-flight, and ground control samples. Most notably, gene pathways related to mitochondrial function were expressed more in space-flown hiPSC-CMs. A comparison of the samples revealed that hiPSC-CMs adopt a unique gene expression pattern during spaceflight, which reverts to one that is similar to groundside controls upon return to normal gravity.

“We’re surprised about how quickly human heart muscle cells are able to adapt to the environment in which they are placed, including microgravity,” Wu says. “These studies may provide insight into cellular mechanisms that could benefit astronaut health during long-duration spaceflight, or potentially lay the foundation for new insights into improving heart health on Earth.”

According to Wu, limitations of the study include its short duration and the use of 2D cell culture. In future studies, the researchers plan to examine the effects of spaceflight and microgravity using more physiologically relevant hiPSC-derived 3D heart tissues with various cell types, including blood vessel cells. “We also plan to test different treatments on the human heart cells to determine if we can prevent some of the changes the heart cells undergo during spaceflight,” Wu says.

This work was supported by the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), a Department of Defense National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (AW), a American Heart Association (AHA) Predoctoral Fellowship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, NIH, a AHA postdoctoral fellowship, a NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the NHLBI Progenitor Cell Biology Consortium, an AHA Grant-in-Aid, Burroughs Wellcome Foundation Innovation in Regulatory Science, and an AHA Established Investigator Award. BioServe Space Technologies and SpaceX were implementation partners.

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Now, a battery membrane technology developed by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) may point to a solution.

As reported in the journal of Joule, the researchers developed a versatile yet affordable battery membrane — from a class of polymers known as AquaPIMs. This class of polymers makes long-lasting and low-cost grid batteries possible based solely on readily available materials such as zinc, iron, and water. The team also developed a simple model showing how different battery membranes impact the lifetime of the battery, which is expected to accelerate early stage R&D for flow-battery technologies, particularly in the search for a suitable membrane for different battery chemistries.

“Our AquaPIM membrane technology is well-positioned to accelerate the path to market for flow batteries that use scalable, low-cost, water-based chemistries,” said Brett Helms, a principal investigator in the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) and staff scientist at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry who led the study. “By using our technology and accompanying empirical models for battery performance and lifetime, other researchers will be able to quickly evaluate the readiness of each component that goes into the battery, from the membrane to the charge-storing materials. This should save time and resources for researchers and product developers alike.”

Most grid battery chemistries have highly alkaline (or basic) electrodes — a positively charged cathode on one side, and a negatively charged anode on the other side. But current state-of-the-art membranes are designed for acidic chemistries, such as the fluorinated membranes found in fuel cells, but not for alkaline flow batteries. (In chemistry, pH is a measure of the hydrogen ion concentration of a solution. Pure water has a pH of 7 and is considered neutral. Acidic solutions have a high concentration of hydrogen ions, and are described as having a low pH, or a pH below 7. On the other hand, alkaline solutions have low concentrations of hydrogen ions and therefore have a high pH, or a pH above 7. In alkaline batteries, the pH can be as high as 14 or 15.)

Fluorinated polymer membranes are also expensive. According to Helms, they can make up 15% to 20% of the battery’s cost, which can run in the range of $300/kWh.

One way to drive down the cost of flow batteries is to eliminate the fluorinated polymer membranes altogether and come up with a high-performing yet cheaper alternative such as AquaPIMs, said Miranda Baran, a graduate student researcher in Helms’ research group and the study’s lead author. Baran is also a Ph.D. student in the Department of Chemistry at UC Berkeley.

Getting back to basics

Helms and co-authors discovered the AquaPIM technology — which stands for “aqueous-compatible polymers of intrinsic microporosity” — while developing polymer membranes for aqueous alkaline (or basic) systems as part of a collaboration with co-author Yet-Ming Chiang, a principal investigator in JCESR and Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Through these early experiments, the researchers learned that membranes modified with an exotic chemical called an “amidoxime” allowed ions to quickly travel between the anode and cathode.

Later, while evaluating AquaPIM membrane performance and compatibility with different grid battery chemistries — for example, one experimental setup used zinc as the anode and an iron-based compound as the cathode — the researchers discovered that AquaPIM membranes lead to remarkably stable alkaline cells.

In addition, they found that the AquaPIM prototypes retained the integrity of the charge-storing materials in the cathode as well as in the anode. When the researchers characterized the membranes at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS), the researchers found that these characteristics were universal across AquaPIM variants.

Baran and her collaborators then tested how an AquaPIM membrane would perform with an aqueous alkaline electrolyte. In this experiment, they discovered that under alkaline conditions, polymer-bound amidoximes are stable — a surprising result considering that organic materials are not typically stable at high pH.

Such stability prevented the AquaPIM membrane pores from collapsing, thus allowing them to stay conductive without any loss in performance over time, whereas the pores of a commercial fluoro-polymer membrane collapsed as expected, to the detriment of its ion transport properties, Helms explained.

This behavior was further corroborated with theoretical studies by Artem Baskin, a postdoctoral researcher working with David Prendergast, who is the acting director of Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry and a principal investigator in JCESR along with Chiang and Helms.

Baskin simulated structures of AquaPIM membranes using computational resources at Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and found that the structure of the polymers making up the membrane were significantly resistant to pore collapse under highly basic conditions in alkaline electrolytes.

A screen test for better batteries

While evaluating AquaPIM membrane performance and compatibility with different grid battery chemistries, the researchers developed a model that tied the performance of the battery to the performance of various membranes. This model could predict the lifetime and efficiency of a flow battery without having to build an entire device. They also showed that similar models could be applied to other battery chemistries and their membranes.

“Typically, you’d have to wait weeks if not months to figure out how long a battery will last after assembling the entire cell. By using a simple and quick membrane screen, you could cut that down to a few hours or days,” Helms said.

The researchers next plan to apply AquaPIM membranes across a broader scope of aqueous flow battery chemistries, from metals and inorganics to organics and polymers. They also anticipate that these membranes are compatible with other aqueous alkaline zinc batteries, including batteries that use either oxygen, manganese oxide, or metal-organic frameworks as the cathode.

Researchers from Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia participated in the study.

Should that happen, the phenomenon would help the environment by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The research, published in Nature, is the most comprehensive study to date investigating the potential future scale and cost of 10 different ways to use carbon dioxide, including in fuels and chemicals, plastics, building materials, soil management and forestry. The study considered processes using carbon dioxide captured from waste gases that are produced by burning fossil fuels or from the atmosphere by an industrial process.

And in a step beyond most previous research on the subject, the authors also considered processes that use carbon dioxide captured biologically by photosynthesis.

The research found that on average each utilization pathway could use around 0.5 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide per year that would otherwise escape into the atmosphere. (A tonne, or metric ton, is equivalent to 1,000 kilograms, and a gigatonne is 1 billion tonnes, or about 1.1 billion U.S. tons.)

A top-end scenario could see more than 10 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide a year used, at a theoretical cost of under $100 per tonne of carbon dioxide. The researchers noted, however, that the potential scales and costs of using carbon dioxide varied substantially across sectors.

“The analysis we presented makes clear that carbon dioxide utilization can be part of the solution to combat climate change, but only if those with the power to make decisions at every level of government and finance commit to changing policies and providing market incentives across multiple sectors,” said Emily Carter, a distinguished professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and a co-author of the paper. “The urgency is huge and we have little time left to effect change.”

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over the rest of the 21st century will require the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on the order of 100 to 1,000 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. Currently, fossil carbon dioxide emissions are increasing by over 1% annually, reaching a record high of 37 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide in 2018.

“Greenhouse gas removal is essential to achieve net zero carbon emissions and stabilise the climate,” said Cameron Hepburn, one of the study’s lead authors, director of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and Environment. “We haven’t reduced our emissions fast enough, so now we also need to start pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Governments and corporations are moving on this, but not quickly enough.

“The promise of carbon dioxide utilization is that it could act as an incentive for carbon dioxide removal and could reduce emissions by displacing fossil fuels.”

Critical to the success of these new technologies as mitigation strategies will be a careful analysis of their overall impact on the climate. Some are likely to be adopted quickly simply because of their attractive business models. For example, in certain kinds of plastic production, using carbon dioxide as a feedstock is a more profitable and environmentally cleaner production process than using conventional hydrocarbons, and it can displace up to three times as much carbon dioxide as it uses.

Biological uses might also present opportunities to reap co-benefits. In other areas, utilization could provide a “better choice” alternative during the global decarbonization process. One example might be the use of fuels derived from carbon dioxide, which could find a role in sectors that are harder to decarbonize, such as aviation.

The authors stressed that there is no “magic bullet” approach.

“I would start by incentivizing the most obvious solutions — most of which already exist — that can act at the gigatonne scale in agriculture, forestry and construction,” said Carter, who also is UCLA’s executive vice chancellor and provost, and the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and Environment Emeritus at Princeton University. “At the same time, I would aggressively invest in R&D across academia, industry and government labs — much more so than is being done in the U.S., especially compared to China — in higher-tech solutions to capture and convert carbon dioxide to useful products that can be developed alongside solutions that already exist in agriculture, forestry and construction.”

“We found that family emotional climate had a big effect on overall health, including the development or worsening of chronic conditions such as stroke and headaches over the 20-year span of midlife,” said Sarah B. Woods, PhD, assistant professor of family and community medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center and lead author of the study. “Contrary to previous research, which found that intimate relationships had a large effect on physical health, we did not get the same results.”

The study was published in the Journal of Family Psychology.

“Most often, researchers focus on romantic relationships, especially marriage, presuming they likely have more of a powerful effect on heath,” Woods said. “Given changes in how Americans are partnering, waiting longer to marry, if at all, and the lengthier, and possibly more emotion-laden trajectories of family-of-origin relationships, we wanted to compare the strength of associations between family and intimate partners and health over time.”

The researchers used data from 2,802 participants in the Midlife Development in the U.S. survey that included a nationally representative sample of adults from 1995 to 2014. Three rounds of data were collected — in 1995 to 1996, 2004 to 2006 and 2013 to 2014. The average participant was 45 years old during the first round.

The survey asked questions about family strain (e.g., “Not including your spouse or partner, how often do members of your family criticize you?”) and family support (e.g., “How much can you rely on [your family] for help if you have a serious problem?”) as well as intimate partner strain (e.g., “How often does your spouse or partner argue with you?”) and support (e.g., “How much does your spouse or partner appreciate you?”)

Health was measured using participants’ total number of chronic conditions, such as stroke, headaches and stomach trouble, experienced in the 12 months prior to each of the three data collection times.

Participants also rated their overall health from excellent to poor at each round.

The researchers found that greater family relationship strain was associated with a greater number of chronic conditions and worse health appraisal 10 years later, during the second and third rounds of data collection.

“Comparatively, we found that greater family support during the second round of data collection in 2004 to 2006 was associated with better health appraisal 10 years later,” said Jacob B. Priest, PhD, assistant professor of education at the University of Iowa and co-author of the study.

There were no significant effects of intimate partner relationships on health outcomes.

“We were honestly stunned that there were zero associations between intimate partner emotional climate and later health,” Woods said.

She and her co-authors theorize that the lack of significant associations between intimate partner relationships and later health could be because those relationships can break up, whereas people are more likely to have longer associations with family members who aren’t a spouse.

“The vast majority of the people in the study had living parents or siblings and thus, their relationship with a spouse or intimate partner was less likely to be as long as that of their family members,” said Patricia N.E. Roberson, PhD, assistant professor of nursing of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and co-author of the study. “Therefore, the emotional intensity of these relationships may be greater, so much so that people experience more of an effect on their health and well-being.”

Woods and her colleagues said their findings show why physical and mental health care providers should consider family relationships when assessing and treating patients.

“For adults who already have a chronic condition, a negative family emotional climate may increase their poor health and conversely, supportive family members may help improve their health outcomes,” Woods said. “This is why I encourage patients to bring supportive family members with them to their doctors’ visits and to create an open dialogue about their health conditions and concerns. Having that support definitely has a significant effect on quality of life and well-being.”

Filtered: the oil is a light golden or amber colour because it has undergone decarboxylation and a filtering process where parts of the plant that were left over from the initial extraction process are removed.

Know your hemp from marijuana

Since hemp and cannabis come from the same plant, many people still confuse hemp with its narcotic cousin. But hemp contains higher levels of CBD and lower levels of the psychoactive element THC (that makes you “high”) than marijuana.

Check the label

Consumers need to look out for certified products and companies that are transparent about what goes into their products. Reputable CBD retailers use and publish Certificates of Analysis (COA) that will tell you the quality of the CBD source and list important information such as its potency and solvent levels.

The certification ensures that, through analysis, the natural integrity of the products is maintained. Check the labels and read the instructions carefully, as the dosages can have different strengths.

If the product doesn’t contain a COA, give them a miss, as you could end up buying a product that’s fraudulent or even toxic.

If you’ve noticed unregistered CBD items, SAHPRA and SAPS urge the public to make them aware of the products that contravene the act (and are illegal). 

You can download the MySAPS App on any iPhone or android to have easy access to the police. You can also provide any information relating to the sale of cannabis to the SAPS through the SAPS Crime Stop number 086 00 10111. Callers may remain anonymous and all information will be treated in the strictest confidence. 

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