Researchers from the University of California San Diego may help bring science fiction to reality by providing a divining rod to guide future space missions, including NASA’s Artemis campaign, which seeks to explore and, eventually, inhabit the moon. Their work appears in a special issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) called “Water on the Moon and Mars,” which features Artemis I on its cover.

The researchers included the father-son team of Mark Thiemens, UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Maxwell Thiemens, a research fellow at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, who is also an alumnus of Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

In 1967, Nobel laureate Harold Urey and James Arnold — both faculty members in UC San Diego’s Department of Chemistry — were among the first to receive Apollo 11 lunar samples. Urey was one of the first scientists to theorize that there was water on the moon, particularly in the permanently shadowed regions of the moon’s poles. Today, scientists believe that water on the moon originated from one of three sources:

• indigenous to the moon,
• created by solar winds (where hydrogen from the sun reacts with oxygen at high energy on the moon and likely Mars to create water)
• deposition (from icy comets that have crashed onto the lunar surface).

On Earth, human civilizations often bubble up near bodies of water and it would be no different in space. On the moon, it’s important to know the origin of the water sources because it will give astronauts guidance on where it would be most prudent to set up bases and habitats.

To learn about the origin of water on the moon, Morgan Nunn Martinez (who was a UC San Diego graduate student at the time) extracted very small amounts from lunar rocks collected from the 1969 Apollo 9 mission. It may sound implausible to get water from a rock, but it is possible through “thermal release,” a process where lunar samples were heated to 50, 150 and 1,000 degrees Celsius (122, 302, and 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit respectively). As it turns out, these rocks were surprisingly “wet.”

The lowest temperatures released lightly bound water molecules — those molecules that are attached to other molecules (in this case, lunar rock) through a weak attraction. At 1,000 degrees Celsius, tightly bound water molecules, which are more deeply embedded in the rock, were released.

Through this process, gas water molecules are collected, then purified so that only the oxygen remains. The team then measured the composition of three different oxygen isotopes.

Isotopes are atoms of the same element that have varying numbers of neutrons, which changes their mass — the more neutrons, the heavier the atom. These measurements are particularly useful in determining a substance’s origin and age.

Think of it like space forensics. In the way humans have unique fingerprints, astronomical objects, like comets and the sun, have unique signatures. Scientists are able to look at the oxygen isotope measurements and determine the origin of the water.

Their data revealed that most of the lunar water likely originated from the moon itself or from comet impacts. Contrary to popular belief, solar winds did not significantly contribute to the moon’s water stores.

“What’s nice about this research is that we’re using the most advanced scientific measurements and it supports common sense ideas about lunar water — much of it has been there since the beginning and more was added by these icy comet impacts,” stated Maxwell Thiemens. “The more complicated method of solar wind-derived water doesn’t appear to have been that productive.”

Although not a main thrust of the paper, the researchers also measured samples from Mars. If NASA’s Artemis program is able to successfully colonize humans on the moon, it would bode well for the ultimate mission of inhabiting Mars.

“This kind of work hasn’t been done before and we think it can provide NASA with some valuable clues about where water is located on the moon,” stated Mark Thiemens. “The real goal of Artemis is to get to Mars. Our research shows that likely there is at least as much water on Mars as on the moon, if not more.”

Of course, locating the water is only the first step. Being able to extract it from lunar rocks and soil in quantities large enough to sustain life will require further technological advancements and discovery.

Full list of authors: Maxwell Thiemens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Morgan Nunn Martinez and Mark Thiemens (UC San Diego).

This research was supported, in part, by a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship, a Zonta International Amelia Earhart Fellowship and the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Fellowship.

“We could target individual cells and explore how this affected their ability to stay healthy and functional,” says Chiara Musumeci, researcher at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics, LOE, at Linköping University.

The brain is controlled by electrical signals that are converted into chemical substances in the communication between the brain cells. It has long been known that different parts of the brain can be stimulated with the help of electricity. But methods are often imprecise and affect large parts of the brain. Sometimes, metal electrodes are needed to hit the right part of the brain, which entails a risk that the hard electrode instead damages the brain tissue, causing inflammation or scarring.

A solution for treating specific parts of the brain could involve conductive plastics, also known as polymers.

“The goal is to combine biological systems with electrodes, specifically using organic conductive polymers. As polymers are soft and conformable and can transport both electricity and ions, they are preferable to conventional electrodes,” says Chiara Musumeci.

Together with researchers at Karolinska Institutet, the research team at Campus Norrköping has succeeded in anchoring the conductive plastic to individual living cell membranes. This opens up for future precise treatments of neurological diseases.

“At the moment, our results are rather general, which is a good thing, as our future research can explore what types of diseases this important tool would be suitable for. But more research is needed before we can say anything with any certainty,” says Alex Bersellini Farinotti, researcher at Karolinska Institutet.

Previous attempts to anchor organic electronics at the cell surface have been made, but with genetically modified cells that make the membranes more receptive. In their present study, the researchers have not used genetically modified cells and yet managed to achieve a tight coupling without affecting the cell’s other functions. This is the first time this has been done.

To succeed, the researchers used a two-step process where an anchor molecule is first used to create an attachment point in the cell membrane. At the other end of the molecule is a structure where the polymer electrode itself can attach.

The next step in the research is to get a more evenly distributed and stable anchoring over the membrane and to see how the polymer coupling behaves over time. Hanne Biesmans is a doctoral student at LOE and believes that there is great potential but also many challenges left to solve.

“We have taken a big step forward now. But we can’t say with any certainty that it will work in living tissue. This is basic research, where we are now trying to figure out the way forward.”

Ocean temperatures were rising at about 0.06 degrees Celsius per decade in the late 1980s, but are now increasing at 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade.

Published today (Tuesday, 28 January 2025) in Environmental Research Letters, the study helps explain why 2023 and early 2024 saw unprecedented ocean temperatures.

Professor Chris Merchant, lead author at the University of Reading, said: “If the oceans were a bathtub of water, then in the 1980s, the hot tap was running slowly, warming up the water by just a fraction of a degree each decade. But now the hot tap is running much faster, and the warming has picked up speed. The way to slow down that warming is to start closing off the hot tap, by cutting global carbon emissions and moving towards net-zero.”

Energy imbalance

This accelerating ocean warming is driven by the Earth’s growing energy imbalance — whereby more energy from the Sun is being absorbed in the Earth system than is escaping back to space. This imbalance has roughly doubled since 2010, in part due to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, and because the Earth is now reflecting less sunlight to space than before.

Global ocean temperatures hit record highs for 450 days straight in 2023 and early 2024. Some of this warmth came from El Niño, a natural warming event in the Pacific. When scientists compared it to a similar El Niño in 2015-16, they found that the rest of the record warmth is explained by the sea surface warming up faster in the past 10 years than in earlier decades. 44% of the record warmth was attributable to the oceans absorbing heat at an accelerating rate.

Expect more warming

The findings show that the overall rate of global ocean warming observed over recent decades is not an accurate guide to what happens next: it is plausible that the ocean temperature increase seen over the past 40 years will be exceeded in just the next 20 years. Because the surface oceans set the pace for global warming, this matters for the climate as a whole. This accelerating warming underscores the urgency of reducing fossil fuel burning to prevent even more rapid temperature increases in the future and to begin to stabilise the climate.

Research into ageing is producing an overwhelming amount of data, making it difficult to determine which interventions — such as new medicines, dietary changes, or exercise routines — are safe and effective. This study investigated how AI can analyse data more efficiently and accurately, by proposing a comprehensive set of standards for AI systems to ensure they deliver accurate, reliable, and understandable evaluations through their ability to analyse complex biological data.

The researchers identified eight critical requirements for effective AI-based evaluations:

1. Correctness of the evaluation results. Data quality will be assessed for accuracy.
2. Usefulness and comprehensiveness.
3. Interpretability and explainability of the evaluation results. Clarity and conciseness of the results and the given explanations.
4. Specific consideration of causal mechanisms affected by the intervention.
5. Consideration of data in a holistic context:
   1. Efficacy and toxicity, and evidence for the existence of a large therapeutic window;
   2. Analyses in an “interdisciplinary” setting.
6. Enabling reproducibility, standardisation, and harmonisation of the analyses (and of the reporting).
7. Specific emphasis on diverse longitudinal large-scale data.
8. Specific emphasis on results that relate to known mechanisms of ageing.

Telling LLMs about these requirements as part of the prompting improved the quality of the recommendations they produced.

Professor Brian Kennedy from the Department of Biochemistry & Physiology, and Healthy Longevity Translational Research Programme at NUS Medicine, who co-led the study, said, “We tested AI methods using real-world examples such as medicines and dietary supplements. We found that by following specific guidelines, AI can provide more accurate and detailed insights. For instance, when analysing rapamycin, a drug often studied for its potential to promote healthy ageing, the AI not only evaluated its efficacy but also provided context-specific explanations and caveats, such as possible side effects.”

“The study’s findings could have far-reaching effects,” added Professor Georg Fuellen, Director, Institute for Biostatistics and Informatics in Medicine and Ageing Research, Rostock University Medical Center, who co-led the study, “For healthcare, telling the AI about the critical requirements of a good response can enable it to find more effective treatments and make them safer to use. Generally, AI tools could design better clinical trials and help tailor health recommendations to each person. This research is a major step toward using AI to improve health outcomes for everyone, especially as they age.”

Moving forward, the team is now focusing on a large-scale study of how to best prompt AI models for longevity-related intervention advice, to evaluate their accuracy and reliability for a wide array of carefully designed benchmarks, that is, curated, high-quality data. The validation of such AI systems is specifically important because the longevity interventions may then be implemented by a large number of healthy people. Prospective studies will need to demonstrate that AI-based evaluations can accurately predict successful outcomes in human trials, paving the way for safer and more effective health interventions.

The team hopes to use their findings to make health and longevity interventions more precise and accessible, and ultimately improve the quality and duration of life. Collaboration between researchers, clinicians, and policymakers will be essential to establish robust regulatory frameworks, ensuring the safe and effective use of AI-driven evaluations.

An emerging area of research is the evolutionarily conserved transfer of mitochondria between cells. Yet researchers have lacked unique and universally accepted terms and practices to describe such transfers. Absent an agreed nomenclature and standard practices, different researchers may use different methods and terminology to describe the same event, or they may employ the same term that actually describe two different processes.

“Over the past few years, we have come to understand that mitochondria can be transferred from one cell to another, and that isolated mitochondria can be transplanted like an organ transplant,” said Keshav K. Singh, Ph.D., professor in the University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Genetics. “Though the origins of mitochondria transfer are unclear, it has been observed in evolutionarily diverse eukaryotes, including yeast, mollusks, fish and rodents, as well as human cells. We are just beginning to understand how alterations in this process contribute to disease pathogenesis and how to harness mitochondria transfer and transplantation biology to develop new therapies.”

In 2024, Singh and Jonathan Brestoff, M.D., Ph.D., Washington University School of Medicine, Saint Louis, Missouri, set up an international consortium on mitochondria transfer and transplantation and led an international team of 31 researchers to develop consensus and recommendations about how to advance the field by providing common terminology and characterizations for the transfer or transplantation of mitochondria. Their consensus paper, “Recommendations for mitochondria transfer and transplantation nomenclature and characterization,” is published in the journal Nature Metabolism.

The paper begins with a brief history of the field — some foundational early discoveries, recent studies of mitochondrial transfer and development of therapeutic approaches, including cell engineering and clinical trials for children requiring extracorporeal membrane oxygenation.

The paper defines types of mitochondria transfer and mitochondria transplantation, and when both the donor and acceptor cell types are established in vivo, that defines a mitochondria transfer axis. The paper reviews methods to define mitochondria transfer, including mitochondria reporter proteins and dyes, methods to enforce transfer, and discussion of the fate of mitochondria after cell entry. Mechanism-based nomenclature is roughly grouped into contact-dependent mitochondria transfer, where the donor cell and recipient cell touch each other, and contact-independent mitochondria transfer.

The recommendations also review therapeutic approaches of mitochondria transplantation, including the definition of transplants; the types, durability, degree of engraftment and heterogeneity of transplants; cell engineering using extracellular mitochondria; and drugs that affect mitochondria transfer. Extracellular mitochondria are common in humans — for example there are about 3 billion to 12 billion extracellular mitochondria in a unit of blood platelets, a blood product that is routinely and safely transfused to patients intravenously.

The paper concludes that “the goal of this proposed nomenclature is to reduce the confusion that can be caused by the introduction of different names for similar processes or extracellular mitochondria subsets as this field has evolved. We recognize that mitochondria transfer and transplantation are very active areas of research and that it is possible that new findings and insights may necessitate updates to the proposed nomenclature.”

Singh has a long-standing interest in mitochondria. He was founding editor-in-chief of the journal Mitochondrion and the founder of the Society for Mitochondria Research and Medicine. In 2007 and 2009, his laboratory showed that isolated mouse mitochondria can be transferred to human cells by co-incubation, providing a proof of principle for transfer of mitochondria by diffusion, and that xeno-transplanted platelet mitochondria from an African American woman who suffered aggressive breast cancer at young age was able to recapitulate aggressiveness of breast cancer in mice. At that time, these findings were not appreciated by the field, Singh says.

The increase in physical activity was mainly seen in those doing semi-routine occupations such as bus driving or hairdressing, and routine occupations such as cleaning or waiting, or technical jobs. There was little change seen among people entering managerial or professional occupations.

The largest drop in levels of physical activity was seen among people who work from home — though their sleep levels did not change when they started work.

Young adulthood — ages 16 to 30 years — is an important time in terms of health. Although we are typically at our peak physical health, it is also a time when many risk factors for long term diseases such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer begin to develop.

Health guidelines recommend young adults get between seven and nine hours of sleep a night, engage in 150 minutes or more of moderate physical activity per week, and consume at least five portions of fruit and vegetables per day.

Young adulthood is also the time when most people start work, which changes their daily routines and activities, resources such as time and money, and social and physical environments — all of which affect health behaviours and health in later life.

To quantify the impact that starting work has on health-related behaviours, a team led by researchers at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge examined repeated data taken over time from more than 3,000 participants in the UK Household Longitudinal Study. All the participants were aged 16-30 years and started work for the first time between 2015 and 2023.

The results are published today in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity.

Dr Eleanor Winpenny, who was based at the University of Cambridge when she carried out the work, but is now at Imperial College London, said: “We know about physical activity and sleep patterns among young people while they’re at school, but very little about what happens when they start work. Given the impact that work can have on our lives — and the lasting impacts this can have on our health — it’s important to try and understand what happens at this transition.”

The analysis showed that when people started work, their physical activity increased by an amount equivalent to around 28 min of moderate activity (such as cycling) per day on average — but then decreased each year after starting work by around 7 min per day.

The biggest increase was among males — up by an equivalent of around 45 min of moderate activity per day compared to an increase of around 16 min for females. People who did not have a university degree also showed a greater increase in physical activity compared to those with a university degree — equivalent to around a 42 min increase of moderate physical activity per day compared to 15 min per day.

Working from home, however, appeared to be associated with an initial decrease in physical activity, equivalent to around 32 min of moderate activity per day.

When young adults started work, the amount of time they slept per night dropped immediately by almost 10 minutes and remained stable at this level over time; however, people without a degree showed a continuing decrease of about 3 minutes of sleep per night each year after starting work, while those with a degree slowly increased back to their pre-work sleep levels.

There was little change in the amount of fruit and vegetables consumed after starting work.

Alena Oxenham, from the MRC Epidemiology Unit, said: “Beginning work can have a profound impact on our lifestyles and on behaviours that might make a difference to our health, if not immediately then later in life.

“Although we found that people tend to do more physical activity when they begin work, which is good news, these are averages, and some people — particularly those who work from home and, to a lesser degree, those with office-based jobs — may do less.

“If we want to stay healthy throughout our lives, we need to remember that keeping active is an important way of helping us achieve this goal. Those working at home might want to consider incorporating physical activity into their day, for example by going for a walk before or after work, or during a lunch break.”

Dr Winpenny added: “Workplaces provide an opportunity to create environments and cultures that support healthier diets, more physical activity and better sleep for young adults. This could result in healthier employees and fewer sick days in the immediate term, but also have long term benefits, helping prevent health issues in later life.”