Carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions are a major contributor to global warming, highlighting the pressing need for emission reduction measures. Consequently, there is a growing exploration of alternatives to fossil fuels, the primary source of CO₂ emissions. Methanol emerges as a versatile and cost-effective fuel, offering a promising alternative to conventional transportation fuels. Furthermore, in efforts to mitigate the impact of these emissions, there has been significant attention directed towards CO₂ capture and utilization technologies. These innovative approaches involve capturing CO₂ from the atmosphere and converting it into value-added products. Methanol synthesis via CO₂ hydrogenation stands out as a particularly promising method among these technologies.

For methanol synthesis via CO₂ hydrogenation, lower reaction temperatures are preferable since heat is released during the reaction. Accordingly, studies have focused on the development of catalysts that exhibit high activities at low temperatures. Copper-zinc oxide (Cu-ZnO) based catalysts are particularly favorable for this purpose due to their ability to form a Cu-ZnO interface that binds and converts CO₂ into formate intermediates which, in turn, promote methanol production. Increasing the surface area of this interface is an effective way to improve production, which can be achieved by increasing the dispersion of Cu nanoparticles. However, Cu nanoparticles are thermally unstable, which aggregate during catalyst preparation and reaction, thus reducing the interface area. Furthermore, the formation of water as a by-product of methanol synthesis accelerates Cu aggregation and inhibits formate formation.

To address these issues, a team of researchers, led by Professor Teruoki Tago from the Department of Chemical Science and Engineering, School of Materials and Chemical Technology at Tokyo Institute of Technology, developed novel Silicalite-1 (S-1) encapsulated Cu-ZnO catalysts. “Research indicates that encapsulating metals within porous carriers like silica or zeolite effectively mitigates thermal aggregation. Therefore, our focus shifted to developing a novel and efficient Cu-based catalyst for methanol production via CO₂ hydrogenation, placing particular emphasis on encapsulating Cu nanoparticles within porous materials.,” explained Tago. Their study was made available online on February 21, 2024, and published formally in Volume 485 of the Chemical Engineering Journal on April 1, 2024. The EU supported the project through their Horizon2020 Framework and the Japan Science and Technology Agency through SCICORP (Laurelin project).

The researchers fabricated two types of catalysts, one including a Cu/S-1 catalyst in which copper was loaded onto hydrophobic S-1 by impregnation, and the other Cu@S-1 catalyst, in which a Cu phyllosilicate (CuPS) powder was used as a metal source to encapsulate Cu particles in the S-1 zeolite. Cu@S-1 was prepared by reducing dissolved CuPS powder. The researchers investigated the dissolution time of the CuPS precursors on the catalyst properties, revealing that inappropriate dissolution times significantly affect the size of Cu particles. Optimal dissolution of the precursor resulted in a catalyst with approximately 2.4-nanometer Cu particles encapsulated within S-1, exhibiting optimal catalytic activity. This catalyst demonstrated higher hydrogenation activity and methanol production than Cu/S-1.

To further improve methanol production, ZnO was added to Cu@S-1 by impregnation, forming ZnO/Cu@S-1 catalyst with fine Cu particles. This catalyst demonstrated even higher activity, suggesting the formation of the Cu-ZnO interface. “Our findings indicate that the encapsulation structure with S-1 effectively suppresses thermal aggregation of Cu particles, while simultaneously facilitating the rapid elimination of the water byproduct from the vicinity of the Cu-ZnO interface, thus enhancing methanol synthesis,” remarked Tago.

Overall, this study demonstrates the effectiveness of the innovative encapsulation method for preparing highly active catalysts, offering a promising avenue for efficient methanol production from CO₂.

Professor Jonghun Kam from the Division of Environmental Science and Engineering at POSTECH used climate model simulations to examine individual effects of aerosols and greenhouse gases produced by human activities, focusing on the spring drought in 2022 that caused severe agricultural damage in the central Andes mountainous region. This research was recently published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, one of international journals in atmospheric science and meteorology.

Drought occurs when there is a prolonged absence of rainfall, leading to a lack of precipitation. It begins as a meteorological drought and progresses to an agricultural drought where the soil loses moisture. More severe droughts can escalate to hydrological droughts, characterized by reduced stream flows. When droughts significantly impact society and the economy, they are termed “socioeconomic droughts.”

The socioeconomic impact of drought is especially severe in societies and countries heavily dependent on agriculture. During the globally severe spring drought of 2022, the central Andean mountainous region of South America (including southern Peru, western Bolivia, and northern Chile), where agriculture is a major industry, experienced greater economic hardship than other regions. However, at that time, a shortage of human resources and funding limited an opportunity to better understand the causes of the 2022 drought.

In the study, Professor Jonghun Kam from POSTECH used 11 different climate models to analyze the impact of human activities on the spring drought that struck the Central Andean region in 2022, the most severe since 1951.

Climate model experiments revealed that human socio-economic activities have increased anthropogenic aerosols in the atmosphere, affecting its chemical composition and worsening the spring drought in the Central Andes. Conversely, the rise in greenhouse gases due to human activities has led to increased precipitation in the region, mitigating extreme spring droughts and reducing the likelihood of such events. Thus, aerosols and greenhouse gases from human activities have had opposite effects on atmospheric chemical composition and precipitation mechanisms.

The study is significant because it challenges previous conclusions that greenhouse gases are the primary cause of drought in South Africa and Iran, highlighting the need for more comprehensive research on the effects of human socio-economic activities.

Professor Jonghun Kam stated, “Some countries are disproportionately affected by extreme weather events due to the climate crisis, yet they often face the lacking of not only human but also financial resources to respond proactively.” He added, “Our goal is to address the global climate crisis by conducting research that supports these countries and thoroughly analyzing the impact of human activities on nature.”

The research was conducted with the support from the Basic Research Program of the National Research Foundation of Korea.

SQUID, short for Surrogate Quantitative Interpretability for Deepnets, is a computational tool created by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) scientists. It’s designed to help interpret how AI models analyze the genome. Compared with other analysis tools, SQUID is more consistent, reduces background noise, and can lead to more accurate predictions about the effects of genetic mutations.

How does it work so much better? The key, CSHL Assistant Professor Peter Koo says, lies in SQUID’s specialized training.

“The tools that people use to try to understand these models have been largely coming from other fields like computer vision or natural language processing. While they can be useful, they’re not optimal for genomics. What we did with SQUID was leverage decades of quantitative genetics knowledge to help us understand what these deep neural networks are learning,” explains Koo.

SQUID works by first generating a library of over 100,000 variant DNA sequences. It then analyzes the library of mutations and their effects using a program called MAVE-NN (Multiplex Assays of Variant Effects Neural Network). This tool allows scientists to perform thousands of virtual experiments simultaneously. In effect, they can “fish out” the algorithms behind a given AI’s most accurate predictions. Their computational “catch” could set the stage for experiments that are more grounded in reality.

“In silico [virtual] experiments are no replacement for actual laboratory experiments. Nevertheless, they can be very informative. They can help scientists form hypotheses for how a particular region of the genome works or how a mutation might have a clinically relevant effect,” explains CSHL Associate Professor Justin Kinney, a co-author of the study.

There are tons of AI models in the sea. More enter the waters each day. Koo, Kinney, and colleagues hope that SQUID will help scientists grab hold of those that best meet their specialized needs.

Though mapped, the human genome remains an incredibly challenging terrain. SQUID could help biologists navigate the field more effectively, bringing them closer to their findings’ true medical implications.

For the study, rather than examine microbiome activity and composition linked to disease conditions — like anxiety and depression — the researchers wanted to flip the script and study the gut microbiome and brain in healthy, resilient people who effectively cope with different types of stress, including discrimination and social isolation.

“If we can identify what a healthy resilient brain and microbiome look like, then we can develop targeted interventions to those areas to reduce stress,” said Arpana Gupta, PhD, senior author and co-director of the UCLA Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center. This is believed to be the first study to explore the intersection of resiliency, the brain, and the gut microbiome.

Gupta and her team focused on methods to cope with stress because research has shown that untreated stress can increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, obesity, and diabetes. While stress is an inevitable part of life, studying how to handle stress can help prevent developing diseases.

To conduct the study, published in Nature Mental Health, the researchers surveyed 116 people about their resiliency — like trust in one’s instincts and positive acceptance of change — and separated them into two groups. One group ranked high on the resiliency scale and the other group ranked low. The participants also underwent MRI imaging and gave stool samples two or three days before their scans.

The researchers found that people in the high resiliency group were less anxious and depressed, less prone to judge, and had activity in regions of the brain associated with emotional regulation and better cognition compared to the group with low resiliency. “When a stressor happens, often we go to this aroused fight or flight response, and this impairs the breaks in your brain,” Gupta said. “But the highly resilient individuals in the study were found to be better at regulating their emotions, less likely to catastrophize, and keep a level head,” added Desiree Delgadillo, postdoctoral researcher and one of the first authors.

The high resiliency group also had different microbiome activity than the low resiliency group. Namely, the high resiliency group’s microbiomes excreted metabolites and exhibited gene activity associated with low inflammation and a strong and healthy gut barrier. A weak gut barrier, otherwise known as a leaky gut, is caused by inflammation and impairs the gut barrier’s ability to absorb essential nutrients needed by the body while blocking toxins from entering the gut.

The researchers were surprised to find these microbiome signatures associated with the high resiliency group.

“Resilience truly is a whole-body phenomenon that not only affects your brain but also your microbiome and what metabolites that it is producing,” Gupta said. “We have this whole community of microbes in our gut that exudes these therapeutic properties and biochemicals, so I’m looking forward to building upon this research,” Delgadillo said.

The team’s future research will study whether an intervention to increase resilience will change brain and gut microbiome activity. “We could have treatments that target both the brain and the gut that can maybe one day prevent disease,” Gupta said.

A new UCLA Health study has found that resilient people exhibit neural activity in the brain regions associated with improved cognition and regulating of emotions, and were more mindful and better at describing their feelings. The same group also exhibited gut microbiome activity linked to a healthy gut, with reduced inflammation and gut barrier.

For the study, rather than examine microbiome activity and composition linked to disease conditions — like anxiety and depression — the researchers wanted to flip the script and study the gut microbiome and brain in healthy, resilient people who effectively cope with different types of stress, including discrimination and social isolation.

“If we can identify what a healthy resilient brain and microbiome look like, then we can develop targeted interventions to those areas to reduce stress,” said Arpana Gupta, PhD, senior author and co-director of the UCLA Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center. This is believed to be the first study to explore the intersection of resiliency, the brain, and the gut microbiome.

Gupta and her team focused on methods to cope with stress because research has shown that untreated stress can increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, obesity, and diabetes. While stress is an inevitable part of life, studying how to handle stress can help prevent developing diseases.

To conduct the study, published in Nature Mental Health, the researchers surveyed 116 people about their resiliency — like trust in one’s instincts and positive acceptance of change — and separated them into two groups. One group ranked high on the resiliency scale and the other group ranked low. The participants also underwent MRI imaging and gave stool samples two or three days before their scans.

The researchers found that people in the h

Gupta and her team focused on methods to cope with stress because research has shown that untreated stress can increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, obesity, and diabetes. While stress is an inevitable part of life, studying how to handle stress can help prevent developing diseases.

To conduct the study, published in Nature Mental Health, the researchers surveyed 116 people about their resiliency — like trust in one’s instincts and positive acceptance of change — and separated them into two groups. One group ranked high on the resiliency scale and the other group ranked low. The participants also underwent MRI imaging and gave stool samples two or three days before their scans.

The researchers found that people in the high resiliency group were less anxious and depressed, less prone to judge, and had activity in regions of the brain associated with emotional regulation and better cognition compared to the group with low resiliency. “When a stressor happens, often we go to this aroused fight or flight response, and this impairs the breaks in your brain,” Gupta said. “But the highly resilient individuals in the study were found to be better at regulating their emotions, less likely to catastrophize, and keep a level head,” added Desiree Delgadillo, postdoctoral researcher and one of the first authors.

The high resiliency group also had different microbiome activity than the low resiliency group. Namely, the high resiliency group’s microbiomes excreted metabolites and exhibited gene activity associated with low inflammation and a strong and healthy gut barrier. A weak gut barrier, otherwise known as a leaky gut, is caused by inflammation and impairs the gut barrier’s ability to absorb essential nutrients needed by the body while blocking toxins from entering the gut.

The researchers were surprised to find these microbiome signatures associated with the high resiliency group.

“Resilience truly is a whole-body phenomenon that not only affects your brain but also your microbiome and what metabolites that it is producing,” Gupta said. “We have this whole community of microbes in our gut that exudes these therapeutic properties and biochemicals, so I’m looking forward to building upon this research,” Delgadillo said.

The team’s future research will study whether an intervention to increase resilience will change brain and gut microbiome activity. “We could have treatments that target both the brain and the gut that can maybe one day prevent disease,” Gupta said.

A new UCLA Health study has found that resilient people exhibit neural activity in the brain regions associated with improved cognition and regulating of emotions, and were more mindful and better at describing their feelings. The same group also exhibited gut microbiome activity linked to a healthy gut, with reduced inflammation and gut barrier.

For the study, rather than examine microbiome activity and composition linked to disease conditions — like anxiety and depression — the researchers wanted to flip the script and study the gut microbiome and brain in healthy, resilient people who effectively cope with different types of stress, including discrimination and social isolation.

“If we can identify what a healthy resilient brain and microbiome look like, then we can develop targeted interventions to those areas to reduce stress,” said Arpana Gupta, PhD, senior author and co-director of the UCLA Goodman-Luskin Microbiome Center. This is believed to be the first study to explore the intersection of resiliency, the brain, and the gut microbiome.

Gupta and her team focused on methods to cope with stress because research has shown that untreated stress can increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, obesity, and diabetes. While stress is an inevitable part of life, studying how to handle stress can help prevent developing diseases.

To conduct the study, published in Nature Mental Health, the researchers surveyed 116 people about their resiliency — like trust in one’s instincts and positive acceptance of change — and separated them into two groups. One group ranked high on the resiliency scale and the other group ranked low. The participants also underwent MRI imaging and gave stool samples two or three days before their scans.

The researchers found that people in the high resiliency group were less anxious and depressed, less prone to judge, and had activity in regions of the brain associated with emotional regulation and better cognition compared to the group with low resiliency. “When a stressor happens, often we go to this aroused fight or flight response, and this impairs the breaks in your brain,” Gupta said. “But the highly resilient individuals in the study were found to be better at regulating their emotions, less likely to catastrophize, and keep a level head,” added Desiree Delgadillo, postdoctoral researcher and one of the first authors.

The high resiliency group also had different microbiome activity than the low resiliency group. Namely, the high resiliency group’s microbiomes excreted metabolites and exhibited gene activity associated with low inflammation and a strong and healthy gut barrier. A weak gut barrier, otherwise known as a leaky gut, is caused by inflammation and impairs the gut barrier’s ability to absorb essential nutrients needed by the body while blocking toxins from entering the gut.

The researchers were surprised to find these microbiome signatures associated with the high resiliency group.

“Resilience truly is a whole-body phenomenon that not only affects your brain but also your microbiome and what metabolites that it is producing,” Gupta said. “We have this whole community of microbes in our gut that exudes these therapeutic properties and biochemicals, so I’m looking forward to building upon this research,” Delgadillo said.

The team’s future research will study whether an intervention to increase resilience will change brain and gut microbiome activity. “We could have treatments that target both the brain and the gut that can maybe one day prevent disease,” Gupta said.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of quantum technologies, ensuring the functionality and reliability of quantum devices is critical. The ability to characterize these devices with high accuracy and speed is essential for their efficient integration into quantum circuits and computers, impacting both fundamental studies and practical applications.

Characterization helps determine if a device operates as expected, which is necessary when devices exhibit anomalies or errors. Identifying and addressing these issues is crucial for advancing the development of future quantum technologies.

Traditionally, scientists have relied on Quantum Process Tomography (QPT), a method that requires a large number of “projective measurements” to reconstruct a device’s operations fully. However, the number of required measurements in QPT scales quadratically with the dimensionality of the operations, posing significant experimental and computational challenges, especially for high-dimensional quantum information processors.

The University of Ottawa research team has pioneered an optimized technique named Fourier Quantum Process Tomography (FQPT). This method allows for the complete characterization of quantum operations with a minimal number of measurements. Instead of performing a large number of projective measurements, FQPT utilises a well-known map, the Fourier transform, to perform a portion of the measurements in two different mathematical spaces. The physical relation between these spaces enhances the information extracted from single measurements, significantly reducing the number of measurements needed. For instance, for processes with dimensions 2d (where d can be arbitrarily high), only seven measurements are required.

To validate their technique, the researchers conducted a photonic experiment using optical polarisation to encode a qubit. The quantum process was realized as a complex space-dependent polarisation transformation, leveraging state-of-the-art liquid-crystal technology. This experiment demonstrated the flexibility and robustness of the method.

“The experimental validation is a fundamental step to probe the technique’s resilience to noise, ensuring robust and high-fidelity reconstructions in realistic experimental scenarios,” said Francesco Di Colandrea, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa.

This novel technique represents a remarkable advancement in quantum computing. The research team is already actively working on extending FQPT to arbitrary quantum operations, including non-Hermitian and higher-dimensional implementations, and in implementing AI techniques to increase accuracy and reduce measurement. This new technique represents a promising avenue for further advancements in quantum technology.

Fortunately, space has dropped a few clues — fragments of objects that formed early in solar system history and plunged through Earth’s atmosphere, called meteorites. The composition of meteorites tells stories of the solar system’s birth, but these stories often raise more questions than answers.

In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of planetary scientists from UCLA and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory reports that refractory metals, which condense at high temperatures, such as iridium and platinum, were more abundant in meteorites formed in the outer disk, which was cold and far away from the sun. These metals should have formed close to the sun, where the temperature was much higher. Was there a pathway that moved these metals from the inner disk to the outer?

Most meteorites formed within the first few million years of solar system history. Some meteorites, called chondrites, are unmelted conglomerations of grains and dust left over from planet formation. Other meteorites experienced enough heat to melt while their parent asteroids were forming. When these asteroids melted, the silicate part and the metallic part separated due to their difference in density, similar to how water and oil don’t mix.

Today, most asteroids are located in a thick belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists think that Jupiter’s gravity disrupted the course of these asteroids, causing many of them to smash into each other and break apart. When pieces of these asteroids fall to Earth and are recovered, they are called meteorites.

Iron meteorites are from the metallic cores of the earliest asteroids, older than any other rocks or celestial objects in our solar system. The irons contain molybdenum isotopes that point toward many different locations across the protoplanetary disk in which these meteorites formed. That allows scientists to learn what the chemical composition of the disk was like in its infancy.

Previous research using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile has found many disks around other stars that resemble concentric rings, like a dartboard. The rings of these planetary disks, such as HL Tau, are separated by physical gaps, so this kind of disk could not provide a route to transport these refractory metals from the inner disk to the outer.

The new paper holds that our solar disk likely didn’t have a ring structure at the very beginning. Instead, our planetary disk looked more like a doughnut, and asteroids with metal grains rich in iridium and platinum metals migrated to the outer disk as it rapidly expanded.

But that confronted the researchers with another puzzle. After the disk expansion, gravity should have pulled these metals back into the sun. But that did not happen.

“Once Jupiter formed, it very likely opened a physical gap that trapped the iridium and platinum metals in the outer disk and prevented them from falling into the sun,” said first author Bidong Zhang, a UCLA planetary scientist. “These metals were later incorporated into asteroids that formed in the outer disk. This explains why meteorites formed in the outer disk — carbonaceous chondrites and carbonaceous-type iron meteorites — have much higher iridium and platinum contents than their inner-disk peers.”

Zhang and his collaborators previously used iron meteorites to reconstruct how water was distributed in the protoplanetary disk.

“Iron meteorites are hidden gems. The more we learn about iron meteorites, the more they unravel the mystery of our solar system’s birth,” Zhang said.