The use of statin drugs to significantly lower cholesterol, and ultimately reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, has become widespread and large-scale studies suggest that nearly half of Americans and a quarter of Canadians are receiving or are eligible for statin treatment.

Unfortunately, a very common side-effect of statin use is the development of muscle pain. In fact, that muscle pain is the primary reason for why people stop taking their statin medication without their physician’s permission.

Understanding why statins cause muscle pain and how this could be treated could remove a significant obstacle for healthcare professionals to effectively manage a patient’s cholesterol and lower their cardiovascular disease risk

The McMaster research team found muscle cells treated with statins released the amino acid called glutamate at much higher levels than muscle cells that were untreated. As glutamate is a potent activator of muscle pain receptors, this release was proposed to trigger the sensation of muscle pain.

Thomas Hawke, senior author of the study and a professor in pathology and molecular medicine at McMaster University said: “We found that statins were able to enter the muscle cells and cause oxidative stress. This resulted in the muscle trying to increase its production of antioxidants to combat this stress. The side-effect of this antioxidant production was the release of glutamate out of the muscle cells.”

Irena Rebalka, first author of the study and a research associate in the Hawke Lab added: “We found that administering some well-known antioxidants, such as Vitamin E, were successful in helping reduce glutamate release. We are now expanding our studies to determine further compounds which could be used in conjunction with a person’s statin prescription to reduce the burden of muscle pain resulting from this drug.”

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By rigorously testing different fabric materials in the laboratory and using them to shield structures that were exposed to fires of increasing magnitude, this research, published in Frontiers in Mechanical Engineering, confirms that existing blanket technology can protect structures from a short wildfire attack. For successful deployment against severe fires and in areas of high housing density, technological advancement of blanket materials and deployment methods, as well as multi-structure protection strategies, are needed.

“The whole-house fire blanket is a viable method of protection against fires at the wildland-urban interface,” says lead study author Fumiaki Takahashi, a Professor at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA, who teamed up with the NASA Glenn Research Center, U.S. Forest Service, New Jersey Forest Fire Service, and Cuyahoga Community College for this study.

He continues, “Current technology can protect an isolated structure against a relatively short wildfire attack and further technological developments are likely to enable this method to be applied to severe situations.”

A burning need

Wildfires in urban and suburban settings can have a devastating effect on communities and pose one of the greatest fire challenges of our time.

People living and working in fire-risk areas contacted Professor Takahashi to find out if commercial products are available to help reduce the likelihood of structure ignition, which would reduce fire damage and improve public and firefighter safety. These pleas motivated the research and an initial investigation revealed that the concept of whole-structure fire blankets has been around for quite some time.

“I thought about a means to reduce wildland fire damage and found a U.S. patent ‘conflagration-retardative curtain’ i.e., a fire blanket, issued during World War Two. In addition, the U.S. Forest Service firefighters managed to save a historic forest cabin by wrapping it with their fire shelter materials,” Takahashi reports.

An old flame-retardant

While there are anecdotal reports on the ability of fire blankets to protect buildings from fires, Takahashi’s research highlighted a severe lack of scientific evidence to back up these claims. To rectify this, funded by a research grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the team conducted several experiments to test the ability of different blanket materials to shield structures against fires of increasing magnitude.

“The fire exposure tests determined how well the fire blankets protected various wooden structures, from a birdhouse in a burning room to a full-size shed in a real forest fire. We tested four types of fabric materials: aramid, fiberglass, amorphous silica, and pre-oxidized carbon, each with and without an aluminum surface. In addition, we conducted laboratory experiments under controlled heat exposure and measured the heat-insulation capabilities of these materials against direct flame contact or radiation heat.”

A hot new industry

The laboratory and real-fire assessments demonstrate that fire blankets could protect structures from a short exposure to a wildfire, but also highlight the technical limitations of their existing form. Further technological advancements are needed in the areas of material composition, deployment methods and multi-structure protection strategies.

Takahashi explains, “The fiberglass or amorphous silica fabrics laminated with aluminum foil performed best, due to high reflection/emission of radiation and good thermal insulation by the fabric. New technology is needed to enhance the fire blankets’ heat-blocking capability for an extended period to prevent structure-to-structure ignition. In addition, it will be more effective If dozens or hundreds of homes are protected by such advanced fire blankets at the same time, particularly in high housing-density Wildland-Urban Interface communities.”

He concludes by suggesting communities potentially affected by wildfires work together to turn the concept of whole-building fire blankets into a reality.

“Fire blanket protection will be significant to those living and fighting fires at the Wildland-Urban Interface and presents entrepreneurs and investors with business opportunities. The implication of the present findings is that the technical community, the general public, and the fire service must work together to take a step-by-step approach toward the successful application of this technology.”

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Scientists had known for years that some Phainopeplas breed in the desert in spring, where they feed on desert mistletoe berries, and others breed in woodlands in the summer, where a wider range of foods are available — but could these actually be the same birds? To find out, Princeton University’s Daniel Baldassarre, now an Assistant Professor at SUNY Oswego, and his colleagues captured 24 adult Phainopeplas breeding in the Mojave Desert in March and April 2017 and fitted them with tiny GPS tags. To download the GPS data and see where they went, they had to recapture the same birds. Fortunately, five of the 24 birds returned to the same site that fall, and all five tagged birds had migrated to coastal woodland habitats and back in the intervening months — exactly where and when the itinerant breeding hypothesis predicted.

“Seeing the GPS tracks for the first time was amazing, but the biggest thrill for me was re-sighting the first tagged bird that returned to the capture site,” says Baldassarre. “We were a bit unsure how likely they were to come back to the same spot, so to see that a tagged bird had returned was an exhilarating moment. When he hit the net it was like, okay, we’re in business here.”

Circumstantial evidence has long raised suspicions that Phainopeplas might be itinerant breeders. Phainopeplas are vocal mimics, and birdwatchers had observed individual birds in desert habitats mimicking species found in woodland habitats and vice versa. The GPS data from this study still doesn’t completely prove that Phainopeplas are itinerant breeders because the researchers were not able to directly observe any tagged birds nesting in coastal woodlands. However, Baldassarre and his colleagues were able to further support their conclusions with DNA analysis showing that desert breeders and woodland breeders are not genetically different.

“I approached this just thinking about it being a cool species and a rare behavior, but as I started to consider the bigger picture, I realized that the sort of flexibility that itinerant breeding species like this seem to be capable of is also interesting from a climate change perspective,” says Baldassarre. “It suggests that they might be able to deal with climate change better than other birds. They’re highly mobile, they can modulate their physiology to go between migratory and breeding periods quickly, and they can deal with different physical and social environments. It makes this interesting beyond just being a weird bird behavior.”

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In the paper, microbiologists report that wild-type Penicillium molds can evolve quickly so that after a matter of weeks these strains closely resembled their domesticated cousin, Penicillium camemberti, the mold that gives camembert cheese its distinctive flavor. The study shows how a fungus can remodel its metabolism over a short amount of time; it also demonstrates a strategy for probing the evolution of other cultures used in food, said study leader and microbiologist Dr. Benjamin Wolfe, Ph.D.

“In fermented foods, there’s a lot of potential for microbes to evolve and change over time,” said Wolfe.

Wolfe’s lab at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., focuses on microbial diversity in fermented foods, but he says the new experiments began with an accidental discovery. His lab had been growing and studying Penicillium commune, a bluish, wild-type fungus well-known for spoiling cheese and other foods. Wolfe likens its smell to a damp basement.

But over time, researchers noticed changes in some of the lab dishes containing the stinky mold. “Over a very short time, that funky, blue, musty-smelling fungus stopped making toxins,” Wolfe said. The cultures lost their bluish hue and turned white; they smelled like fresh grass and began to look more P. camemberti. “That suggested it could really change quickly in some environments,” he said.

To study that evolution in real-time, Wolfe and his collaborators collected fungal samples from a cheese cave in Vermont that had been colonized by wild strains of Penicillium molds. The researchers grew the molds in lab dishes containing cheese curds. In some dishes, the wild mold was grown alone; in others, it was grown alongside microbes that are known competitors in the fierce world of cheese colonization.

After one week, Wolfe said, the molds appeared blue-green and fuzzy — virtually unchanged — in all the experimental tests. But over time, in the dishes where the mold grew alone, its appearance changed. Within three or four weeks of serial passage, during which mold populations were transferred to new dishes containing cheese curds, 30-40 percent of the mold samples began to look more like P. camemberti. In some dishes, it grew whiter and smoother; in others, less fuzzy. (In the competitive test cases, the wild mold did not evolve as quickly or noticeably.)

In follow-up analyses, Wolfe and his team tried to identify genomic mutations that might explain the quick evolution but didn’t find any obvious culprits. “It’s not necessarily just genetic,” Wolfe said. “There’s something about growing in this cheese environment that likely flips an epigenetic switch. We don’t know what triggers it, and we don’t know how stable it is.”

Researchers suspect that the microbes used in most fermented foods — including cheese, but also beer, wine, sake, and others — were unintentionally domesticated, and that they evolved different flavors and textures in reaction to growing in a food environment. Wolfe says his lab’s study suggests that wild strains could be domesticated intentionally to produce new kinds of artisanal foods.

Starting with cheese, of course. “The fungi that are used to make American camembert are French,” said Wolfe, “but maybe we can go out and find wild strains, bring them into the lab, and domesticate them. We could have a diverse new approach to making cheese in the United States.”

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