But don’t start packing just yet. First, we must figure out how to build structures millions of miles from Earth. Sending rockets carrying massive payloads of construction materials into space isn’t practical or affordable. So, how can we use the resources already present on the Red Planet to build your dream home?

Enter Texas A&M University’s Dr. Congrui Grace Jin with the possible answer.

Jin and her colleagues from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have worked for years on bio-manufacturing engineered living materials and have developed a synthetic lichen system that can form building materials with no outside intervention. Their latest study, funded by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program and recently published in the Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering, applies this research to the autonomous construction of structures on Mars, using the planet’s regolith, which includes dust, sand and rocks.

This advancement has the potential to revolutionize extraterrestrial construction by enabling structures to be built in the most demanding environments with restricted resources.

“We can build a synthetic community by mimicking natural lichens,” explains Jin. “We’ve developed a way to build synthetic lichens to create biomaterials that glue Martian regolith particles into structures. Then, through 3D printing, a wide range of structures can be fabricated, such as buildings, houses and furniture.”

Others have researched a variety of methods for bonding Martian regolith particles, including magnesium-based, sulfur-based, and a geopolymer creation. Yet all the methods require significant human assistance and thus are not feasible with the obvious lack of manpower on Mars.

Another approach has been microbe-mediated self-growing technology. Various designs have been developed, such as bacterial biomineralization to bind sand particles into masonry, ureolytic bacteria to promote the production of calcium carbonate to make bricks, and NASA’s exploration of the use of fungal mycelium as a bonding agent.

Although microbe-mediated self-growing technology is very promising, the current practices are not completely autonomous because the microbes being used are limited to a single species or strain, thus their survivability requires a continuous supply of nutrients, meaning outside intervention is needed. Again, the lack of manpower on Mars makes this challenging.

To solve this problem, Jin’s team has developed a completely autonomous self-growing technology by designing a synthetic community making use of the advantages of multiple species. This system eliminates the need for external nutrient supplies.

The design uses heterotrophic filamentous fungi as bonding material producers because they can promote large amounts of biominerals and survive harsh conditions much better than heterotrophic bacteria. These fungi are paired with photoautotrophic diazotrophic cyanobacteria to create the synthetic lichen system.

How does it work? The diazotrophic cyanobacteria fix carbon dioxide and dinitrogen from the atmosphere and convert them into oxygen and organic nutrients to help the survival and growth of filamentous fungi and increase the concentration of carbonate ions by photosynthetic activities. The filamentous fungi bind metal ions onto fungal cell walls and serve as nucleation sites for biomineral production, as well as enhance the growth of cyanobacteria by providing them water, minerals, and carbon dioxide. Both components secrete biopolymers that enhance the adhesion and cohesion among Martian regolith and precipitated particles to create a consolidated body.

The system grows with only Martian regolith simulant, air, light and an inorganic liquid medium. In other words, no manpower needed.

“The potential of this self-growing technology in enabling long-term extraterrestrial exploration and colonization is significant,” states Jin.

The next step of the project, already underway, is the creation of regolith ink to print bio-structures using the 3D printing technique of direct ink writing.

Jin is an assistant professor in the Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering Technology program in the Department of Engineering Technology and Industrial Distribution at Texas A&M University. Her fellow researchers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln are Dr. Richard Wilson, Nisha Rokaya and Erin Carr. Read about the team’s related research.

Funding for this research is administered by the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES), the official research agency for Texas A&M Engineering.

Bats are natural reservoirs for a wide range of microorganisms, including many notable pathogens that have been transmitted to humans. However, a full survey of the diverse array of viruses, fungi, bacteria, and parasites that infect bats has been lacking. Most previous studies have focused on bat feces rather than the animals’ organs.

In the new study, researchers looked inside the kidneys of 142 bats from ten species, collected over four years across five areas of Yunnan province, China. Using advanced genetic sequencing, the team found 22 viruses — 20 of them never seen before.

Two of the most concerning were new henipaviruses, the same genus as Nipah and Hendra viruses, which are known for their high fatality rates in humans. The henipaviruses were found in fruit bats living near orchards close to human villages. Since henipaviruses can spread through urine, the study raises concerns about contaminated fruit and the risk of these viruses jumping to humans or livestock.

The research also identified a novel protozoan parasite, tentatively named Klossiella yunnanensis, along with two highly abundant bacterial species, one of which is a newly discovered species — Flavobacterium yunnanensis.

“These findings broaden our understanding of the bat kidney infectome, underscore critical zoonotic threats, and highlight the need for comprehensive, full-spectrum microbial analyses of previously understudied organs to better assess spillover risks from bat populations.,” the authors say.

The authors add: “By analyzing the infectome of bat kidneys collected near village orchards and caves in Yunnan, we uncovered not only the diverse microbes bats carry, but also the first full-length genomes of novel bat-borne henipaviruses closely related to Hendra and Nipah viruses identified in China — raising urgent concerns about the potential for these viruses to spill over into humans or livestock.”

Funding: This study was funded by grants from the National Key R&D Program of China (2024YFC2607501 & 2024YFC2607502 to M.S.), Yunnan Revitalization Talent Support Program Top Physician Project (XDYC-MY-2022-0074 to Y.F.), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (82341118 to M.S.), Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province of China (2022A1515011854 to M.S.), Shenzhen Science and Technology Program (KQTD20200820145822023 to M.S.), Major Project of Guangzhou National Laboratory (GZNL2023A01001 to M.S.), Guangdong Province “Pearl River Talent Plan” Innovation, Entrepreneurship Team Project (2019ZT08Y464 to M.S.), and the Fund of Shenzhen Key Laboratory (ZDSYS20220606100803007 to M.S.), National Health & Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Investigator grant (GNT2017197 to E.C.H.) and AIR@InnoHK administered by the Innovation and Technology Commission, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (to E.C.H.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Now, a groundbreaking study in PLOS Biology led by Dr. Robert Brocklehurst, a former postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (OEB) at Harvard University, offers a surprising answer: the path to upright posture wasn’t linear, but full of unexpected detours, evolutionary experimentation, and dramatic anatomical upheaval.

“The evolution of mammals has previously been characterized as a series of steps from sprawling, to semi-sprawling, to upright,” said Brocklehurst. “However, what we discovered was a more nonlinear evolutionary progression throughout mammalian history.”

All mammals — from bats and whales to moles and humans — share a distinctive way of moving: they hold their limbs underneath their bodies, unlike the sprawling posture with limbs out to the side. This posture enables more efficient movement and is tied to mammals’ ability to adapt to diverse lifestyles, from digging to flying. This dramatic transition was also accompanied by big changes in limb bone shape and mechanics. To assess these changes, the team analyzed the humerus (upper arm bone) of over 60 non-mammalian synapsid fossils and 140 living animals, including mammals, reptiles and amphibians.

Using a novel analytical technique, pioneered in senior author Professor Stephanie Pierce’s lab (also in OEB), researchers mapped each bone’s surface to measure traits like length, mass distribution, muscle leverage, and torsion (the degree to which the bone twists along its length). These traits correlate with specific modes of locomotion and allowed the researchers to reconstruct posture and locomotion in the fossils.

“By correlating bone shape and limb biomechanics with posture, we could test how well the fossil bones were optimized for specific functional tasks, like upright walking versus sprawled walking,” Brocklehurst said. The researchers achieved this by mapping the fossil non-mammalian synapsids onto a functional adaptive landscape, similar to a topographic map, with peaks and valleys that relate to high and low performance of different locomotor postures.

“We expected to see a neat progression — from sprawling pelycosaurs to a bit more upright therapsids, then cynodonts, then fully upright mammals,” said Brocklehurst. “Instead, we found bursts of innovation.”

The findings suggest that mammal evolution involved a series of adaptive radiations, with each major ancestral groups exploring a range of forelimb functions and postures — some of which were closer to modern mammals, others not.

“The path to upright posture wasn’t a straight line,” says Pierce, “the ancestors of mammals weren’t steps on a ladder with modern mammals at the top. Mammals have been evolving and radiating into many different niches and habitats throughout their history, and their postures reflect that variation.”

One fossil, a close relative of today’s marsupials and placentals, showed bone features consistent with a modern upright gait, suggesting that fully parasagittal postures evolved relatively late in mammalian history as opposed to previously held hypotheses. This result supports recent work from the same lab on the backbone and hindlimb.

“Our work challenges the idea that posture changed gradually and early on,” said Pierce, “instead, it shows that upright posture and locomotion were a late evolutionary innovation, not an early defining trait of the mammalian lineage.”

The researchers also challenge the long-held idea that the earliest non-mammalian synapsids sprawled in a similar way to living lizards or crocodiles. “Our study showed that most synapsid limbs functioned differently than those of modern reptiles. They’re not just copies of reptiles, but distinctive animals in their own right that are a little different from anything that’s alive today,” says co-author Kenneth Angielczyk of Chicago’s Field Museum.

To compare such a wide range of bones — spanning hundreds of species, including those hundreds of millions of years apart in age and wildly different in shape — the team had to overcome major technical hurdles. Traditional methods that describe shape in similar structures didn’t work. So, the team re-engineered an existing R software package designed for a different task, transforming it into a novel “slice-based” landmarking tool tailored for this study. Co-author Magdalen Mercado, former undergraduate student in the Integrative Biology program at Harvard, helped gather the extensive dataset as part of her senior thesis and research in the Pierce lab.

The study builds on a rich scientific legacy — both at Harvard and in paleontology. Pierce, who is also Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), noted that, “Researchers and former MCZ curators, like Alfred Sherwood Romer and Farish Jenkins, Jr., were grappling with these same questions a century ago. Now, with new tools and data, we can revisit those ideas and see the story more clearly.”

This study marks the first large-scale evolutionary analysis of mammalian posture using quantitative biomechanics. But that’s just the beginning. The team is now building detailed models of forelimbs in select fossil species to understand how joints and muscles functioned in ancient animals, offering even deeper insights into the evolution of mammalian motion.

As Brocklehurst put it: “Understanding how mammals came to walk upright isn’t just about bones, it’s about uncovering the dynamic history of life on Earth.”

Funding was provided by the US National Science Foundation (DEB1754459 and DEB1754502), by the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and the Wetmore Colles Fund.

Robert Brocklehurst is currently a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Magdalen Mercado is currently a graduate student in the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago.

A new study, published on June 23 in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, analyzed water quality in more than 500 watersheds across the Western U.S., and is the first large-scale assessment of post-wildfire quality.

The research was led by scientists from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“We were attempting to look at notable trends in post-wildfire water quality across the entire U.S. West, to help inform water management strategies in preparing for wildfire effects,” said Carli Brucker, lead author and former CU Boulder and Western Water Assessment PhD student.

The results showed contaminants like organic carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen, and sediment can degrade water quality for up to eight years after a fire. Water managers can use this data to help them plan for the future and respond appropriately when wildfires strike.

CIRES Fellow and Western Water Assessment Director Ben Livneh was the principal investigator and co-author of the study. Much of his research focuses on hydrology, or water supply, on a continental scale. When he realized he could use the same approach to understand large-scale trends in water quality, he was excited to test the method.

“There’s been a lot of work, for example, in the National Climate Assessment and the International Panel on Climate Change talking about changes in global water supply,” said Livneh, associate professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering. “But those assessments point to this gap in water quality assessments in a continental scale context, whereas people like me in physical hydrology have been thinking about the continental scale challenges for a while.”

Researchers have long known that fire ash and soil destruction contribute to degraded water quality. Yet, past research has largely been limited to state and municipal studies — cities and towns test water quality in local streams and rivers following large fires.

For the new study, the team analyzed more than 100,000 water samples from 500 sites: half from burned river basins and half from unburned. They measured levels of organic carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment as well as turbidity, or cloudiness, of each sample.

To understand wildfire-driven impacts, the team built data-driven models to measure how much contaminants changed in each basin before and after wildfires. In the final step, they compiled data to find the average across the burned basins for each pre- and post-wildfire year, and then compared those to the unburned basins.

The results showed watersheds take longer to recover after wildfires than previous studies found. Organic carbon, phosphorus, and turbidity are significantly elevated in the first one to five years post-fire. Nitrogen and sediment show significant increases up to eight years post-fire. Fire-driven impacts were worse in more forested areas.

“It can take two years, up to eight years, for the effect to be fully felt,” Livneh said. “Sometimes it can be a delayed effect, meaning, it’s not all happening right away, or sometimes you need a big enough storm that will mobilize enough of the leftover contaminants.”

Each watershed in the study felt the impacts differently. This is likely tied to where the fire struck — a fire closer to the river would be worse than an upstream fire. Different soils, vegetation, and weather also change the impact in each watershed, making it difficult to plan for the future.

“There’s a huge amount of variability in sedimentation rates,” said Brucker, who now works as a consultant. “Some streams are completely clear of sediment after wildfires, and some have 2000 times the amount of sediment.”

Despite variability across river basins, the study provides concrete numbers that give insight to water managers across the Western U.S. Researchers hope the results provide better direction on informing future planning efforts for increasing wildfire resilience.

“I’m hoping that providing concrete numbers is very impactful to water managers,” Brucker said. “You can’t fund resilience improvements on general concerns alone. Water managers need real numbers for planning, and that’s what we’re providing,” Brucker said.

Microglial cells, the resident immune cells of the central nervous system (CNS), regulate inflammatory responses by releasing pro-inflammatory cytokines — chemical signaling molecules. While the neuroinflammatory functions of microglial cells are well-documented, the exact role of astrocytes (a specialized type of glial cell) in neural growth and development has remained unclear until recently. To shine light on the role of astrocytes in neuroinflammation and in the pathophysiology of MDD, a team of researchers, led by Dr. Gaurav Singhal from the Department of Surgery, University of Wisconsin, USA, conducted an in-depth review of literature. Their findings will be published in Neuroprotection.

Explaining the motivation behind the present study, Dr. Singhal says, “MDD is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide and affects more than 280 million people across all age groups and regions. Moreover, the economic burden of MDD is substantial, with annual costs in the United States alone exceeding $326 billion. Gaining insights into the role of astrocytes in neuroinflammation can aid the development of therapeutic approaches to treat depression and other psychiatric disorders.”

The research team began by conducting a comprehensive literature search using widely used online repositories such as PubMed and Google Scholar. They evaluated 226 research papers relevant to astrocytes, neuroinflammation, and depression. To ensure the high quality of their study, they followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines.

In their analysis, the researchers found that astrocytes were key to maintaining the structural integrity of synaptic junctions between neurons. The release of neurotrophic factors such as brain-derived neurotrophic factor and fibroblast growth factor-2 by astrocytes were critical for the promotion of neurite growth and synapse formation. Besides stabilizing the tripartite synapse comprising of neuron-astrocyte-neuron, astrocytes further facilitated the effective communication between neurons via regulation of the ionic environment. Notably, changes in astrocyte morphology and function were associated with poor synaptic connectivity, contributing to the development of depressive symptoms.

Furthermore, they discovered a critical mechanism involving activated microglia and astrocytes that resulted in sustained neuroinflammation in MDD. The first step of the mechanism was the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines like tumor necrosis factor-α and interleukin-1 from activated microglia cells. These signals subsequently induced the secretion of additional inflammatory chemicals from astrocytes, thereby amplifying neuroinflammation.

Elaborating on the molecular crosstalk between microglia and astrocytes during MDD, Dr. Singhal explains, “Increased intracellular calcium levels within astrocytes can induce the release of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which, in turn, triggers a delayed calcium response in microglial cells. Following multiple cycles of astrocyte-released ATP-based activation,  microglial cells eventually undergo apoptosis or programed cell death.”

Additionally, preclinical studies involving murine models showed that astrocytic lactate dehydrogenase A enzyme, responsible for lactate production, is important for maintaining neuronal excitability. A process known as histone lactylation — where lactate molecules are added to histone proteins in DNA — was found to alter gene expression, thereby contributing to astrocyte-driven neuroinflammation.

Taken together, this study highlights the molecular mechanisms underlying astrocytic dysfunction, wherein astrocytes switch from a neuroprotective role to one that promotes neuroinflammation by increasing the expression and secretion of inflammatory cytokines.