There are plenty of studies on pesticide exposure among people who tend and harvest crops grown in treated environments. But John M. Clark and colleagues couldn’t find much comparable information about individuals who play sports, including soccer and golf, in the great outdoors. So, his team designed a study to investigate golfers’ potential risks from four pesticides, which have low volatilities and relatively low toxicities for humans, and are commonly used on golf course turfgrass: cyfluthrin (insecticide), chlorothalonil (fungicide), MCPP-p (herbicide) and 2,4-D (herbicide).

For the study, the researchers created what they deemed a “worst-case-scenario” 18-hole course: All areas of a simulated golf course were treated with the manufacturers’ suggested maximum amount of all four pesticides. Then they recruited eight volunteer golfers to play a full round on the treated turf one hour after pesticide application and to remain on the course for four hours. To measure pesticide exposure, four of the volunteers wore cotton full-body suits with veils, socks and gloves that would pick up contact residues and personal air samplers that would capture airborne residues. The other four volunteers wore cut-off cotton suits over their own golfing clothes and submitted urine samples after the round.

After the volunteers finished golfing, Clark’s team measured pesticide residues on the dosimetry suits and air samplers and found that the hand and lower leg segments picked up the most residue while airborne residues contributed little to exposure. The researchers also measured the volunteers’ exposure risk from the levels of pesticides found on the suits and in the urine samples by calculating the hazard quotient (HQ). The team found that the HQ values from the golfers’ exposure indicated little risk to the four pesticides used in this study.

Finally, Clark and colleagues compared the insecticide cyfluthrin results to their 2008 Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry study with older, neurotoxic insecticides at the same simulated golf course site — and using the same protocols. Both studies’ HQ values were well below 1.0, the level that indicates potentially unsafe exposure. However, in the prior work, the volunteers’ urinalysis HQ values of 0.0318 and 0.054 for chlorpyrifos and carbaryl, respectively, were an order of magnitude greater than the volunteers’ urinalysis HQ of 0.0043 from this 2024 study with the insecticide cyfluthrin. The researchers say this comparison shows the potential benefit of using modern, lower volatility and less toxic pesticides, which could further reduce golfers’ risk of adverse effects from exposure.

The authors acknowledge funding from the United States Golf Association and the New England Regional Turf Foundation.

But by improving on a well-known electrochemical reaction and orchestrating a “symphony” of lithium, nitrogen and hydrogen atoms, University of Illinois Chicago engineers led by Meenesh Singhhave developed a new ammonia production processthat meets several green targets.

The process, called lithium-mediated ammonia synthesis, combines nitrogen gas and a hydrogen-donating fluid such as ethanol with a charged lithium electrode. Instead of cracking apart nitrogen gas molecules with high temperature and pressure, nitrogen atoms stick to the lithium, then combine with hydrogen to make the ammonia molecule.

The reaction works at low temperatures, and it’s also regenerative, restoring the original materials with each cycle of ammonia production.

“There are two loops that happen. One is regeneration of the hydrogen source and second is the regeneration of the lithium,” said Singh, associate professor of chemical engineering at UIC. “There is a symphony in this reaction, due to the cyclic process. What we did was understand this symphony in a better way and try to modulate it in a very efficient way, so that we can create a resonance and make it move faster.”

The process, described in a paper published and featured on the cover of ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, is the latest innovation from Singh’s lab in the quest for cleaner ammonia. Previously, his group developed methods to synthesize the chemical using sunlight and wastewater and created an electrified copper mesh screen that reduces the amount of energy needed to make ammonia.

Their latest advance is built on a reaction that is hardly new. Scientists have known about it for nearly a century.

“The lithium-based approach can actually be found in any organic chemistry textbook. It’s very well-known” Singh said. “But making this cycle run efficiently and selectively enough to meet economically feasible targets was our contribution.”

Those targets include high energy efficiency and low cost. If scaled up, the process would produce ammonia at roughly $450 per ton, which is 60% cheaper than prior lithium-based approaches and other proposed green methods, according to Singh.

But selectivity is also important, as many attempts to make ammonia production cleaner have ended up creating large quantities of unwanted hydrogen gas instead.

The Singh group’s results are among the first to achieve levels of selectivity and energy use that could meet Department of Energy standards for industrial-scale production of ammonia. Singh also said the process, which can be performed in a modular reactor, can be made even greener by powering it with electricity from solar panels or other renewable sources and feeding the reaction with air and water.

The process also could help meet another energy goal — the use of hydrogen as fuel. Reaching that goal has been stymied by the difficulties of transporting the highly combustible liquid.

“You want hydrogen to be generated, transported and delivered to hydrogen pumping stations, where hydrogen can be fed to the cars. But it’s very dangerous,” Singh said. “Ammonia could function as a carrier of hydrogen. It’s very cheap and safe to transport, and at the destination you can convert ammonia back to hydrogen.”

Currently, the scientists are partnering with the General Ammonia Co. to pilot and scale up their lithium-mediated ammonia synthesis process at a plant in the Chicago area. UIC’s Office of Technology Management has filed a patent for the process.

The research was funded by grants from General Ammonia Co. Co-authors of the paper are Nishithan C. Kani and Ishita Goyal of UIC, Joseph A. Gauthier of Texas Tech University and Windom Shields and Mitchell Shields of General Ammonia Co.

A research team led by Professor Yong-Tae Kim from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), in collaboration with Professor Kyu-Young Park from the Graduate Institute of Ferrous & Eco Materials Technology and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at POSTECH, and the research team of Dr. Woochul Jung from the Research Institute of Industrial Science and Technology (RIST), has discovered that the purity specifications for cathode materials, as set by cell manufacturers, are overly stringent. Their research demonstrates that streamlining the lithium refining process could substantially reduce the unit cost of batteries. The research findings are published in ‘Nature Communications’, one of international scientific journals.

In this research, the team delved into the impact of lithium raw material purity on the production and performance of secondary battery cathode materials. Conventionally, it’s assumed that impurities in lithium materials hamper secondary battery performance. Therefore, the goal is to manufacture lithium materials with purity of at least 99.5%. Nevertheless, the team uncovered that the presence of approximately 1% magnesium (Mg) impurity in the lithium raw material actually enhances process efficiency and prolongs the secondary battery’s lifespan. Through their experiments, they demonstrated that utilizing low-purity lithium, not entirely rid of impurities, could reduce secondary battery production costs and carbon dioxide emissions by up to 19.4% and 9.0%, respectively.

Professor Yong-Tae Kim who led the research stated, ” Secondary battery cell manufacturers need to reassess whether their current cathode material specifications are too stringent.” He further remarked, “Considering unconventional approaches could offer a fresh strategy against China’s aggressively low prices.”

In mammals, social behaviour and social status can substantially influence the survival, reproductive performance and health of individuals. However, it is not yet fully understood how the translation of social and environmental factors into the physiology of an organism is reflected in molecular processes. Now, scientists from the Leibniz-IZW Department of Evolutionary Genetics and the Serengeti Hyena Project at the Leibniz-IZW’s Department of Ecological Dynamics found that social status influenced epigenetic patterns, more specifically the methylation of DNA in both young and adult female spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) which determines the activation of genes. They analysed DNA from gut epithelium cells from 18 adult female hyenas and 24 cubs with known social status from three clans in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania. The scientists identified and validated 149 genome regions, where high-ranking and low-ranking individuals differed in the methylation of DNA (differentially methylated regions, DMRs). “We could, for the first time, provide evidence for epigenetic signatures of social inequalities in both young and adult spotted hyenas,” says Dr Alexandra Weyrich, head of the working group “Wildlife Epigenetics” in the Leibniz-IZW Department of Evolutionary Genetics and senior author of the paper.

The findings show that these epigenetic signatures are stable across life stages — and that they are linked to important physiological processes: Many of the identified DMRs were involved in the regulation of energy conversion, immune response, glutamate receptor signalling and ion transportation. “Especially the large number of DMRs in genes involved in energy conversion caught our eye,” says first author Colin Vullioud, data scientist in Weyrich’s working group. Co-author Dr Sarah Benhaiem, co-head of the Serengeti Hyena Project, explains: “We suspect that this may be driven by differences in behaviour and specifically the greater use of long-distance foraging trips by low-ranking than high-ranking females — the latter monopolising resources in their clan territory.” Interestingly, these genes were more methylated (or hypermethylated) in low-ranking adult females but not in cubs. This could indicate an adjustment of low-ranking adult females to higher energetic costs of frequent long-distance commuting, a behaviour not displayed by cubs. “Although the exact physiological consequences of the observed hypermethylation remain to be investigated, these findings are consistent with our observations and hint at the sought-after missing link between social and physiological factors,” Weyrich and Benhaiem conclude.

The analyses built on the expertise in epigenetics of the Leibniz-IZW as well as on the long-term research on spotted hyenas in the Serengeti, which started in 1987. The females in this investigation are individually known and their social status has been tracked for generations. This provided ideal conditions to study the links between behaviour, physiological factors, epigenetic modifications and fitness in terms of survival and reproduction in a wild population. “We collected our samples without invading the life of the hyenas,” say Dr Marion L. East and Professor Dr Heribert Hofer, founders of the Serengeti hyena project and co-authors of the paper. “We followed our study animals, collected super-fresh droppings immediately after they were produced and preserved gut epithelium samples from the surface of the faeces.” The use of samples collected in a non-invasive manner is one of the strengths of the investigation, the authors surmise. “The capture methylation method we used enriches methylated DNA as well as mammalian DNA, which improved the amount of hyena DNA over bacterial DNA and the quality of the sequencing data,” explains Weyrich.

DNA methylation is a chemical modification of the basic building blocks of a cell’s genetic material. This modification is enabled by the transfer of methyl groups to nucleobases at certain positions in the DNA. As the basic structure of the respective nucleobase is unaltered, DNA methylation is not a genetic mutation, but a modification which determines whether this part of the DNA is ‘being used’ (activated) or switched off. DNA methylation is the most important epigenetic modification and thus a pivotal part of making genetic information available to the physiological processes within a cell.

Spotted hyenas are highly social and a model for social status-related differences in life history traits that are accompanied by differences in physiological processes and health. In hyena clans, females and their offspring socially dominate all immigrant males, and social status is behaviourally “inherited” by cubs from mothers who gain privileges associated with maternal social status. “As in some primate species, young hyenas receive social support from their mothers during interactions with group members. From these they learn that they can dominate all individuals which are submissive to their mother, but have to submit to those which their mother is submissive to,” explains East. Therefore, social status is stable and predictable because it is determined by family relationships and behavioural conventions.

“Additionally, the effects of social status on life history trajectories and health are typically passed across generations,” adds Hofer. For example, high-ranking females have priority access to resources in the clan territory and do not need to commute as much as low-ranking females to find food. They are therefore much more often present at the communal den and more frequently nurse their young. The milk-dependent cubs disproportionally benefit at this early stage in their life — by growing faster, having a higher chance of surviving to adulthood and starting reproduction at an earlier age than the offspring of low-ranking females.

Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and their collaborators at the University of Exeter and the University of Cambridge, were able to reassess genetic data from nearly 10,000 families from the Deciphering Developmental Disorders study.

In a new study, recently published in Genetics in Medicine, they show for the first time that using exome sequencing — which reads only protein-coding DNA — is as accurate, if not better, than standard microarrays at identifying disease-causing structural genetic variations.

Its adoption offers hope for faster and more accurate diagnoses of rare genetic diseases. It could also deliver substantial cost savings for the NHS, though more training is needed for specialists to generate and analyse the data, say researchers.

Changes in our genetic code can range from single letter changes to the deletion or duplication of larger stretches of DNA. These bigger changes — called copy number variations (CNVs) — can be harder for clinical teams to detect in sequencing data and understand, which is why microarrays are used. While usually harmless, making up one of the major sources of genetic diversity in humans, these large-scale variations can sometimes cause various neurodevelopmental disorders, including Angelman syndrome, DiGeorge syndrome, and Williams-Beuren syndrome.

Currently, children suspected to have genetic diseases arising from these large deletions or duplications of DNA go through a lengthy process of testing and waiting for results from multiple diagnostic approaches, starting with a microarray test before progressing to a broader genome-wide sequencing test (such as exome or genome sequencing). In this new study, scientists set out to develop a single approach to detect these structural changes, using data available from genome-wide exome sequencing assays.

Using data from the Deciphering Developmental Disorders study, the team developed a single-assay approach that combined four algorithms using machine learning methods to analyse exome sequencing data.

Comparison of the new single-assay approach with current standard clinical methods revealed it could reliably detect 305 large-scale pathogenic mutations, including 91 not previously detectable using standard clinical microarrays. The findings suggest it could replace the current methods.

Caroline Wright, Professor of Genomic Medicine at the University of Exeter, and author of the study, said: “Using exome sequencing data to detect clinically important large-scale changes, at the same time as small genetic variants, marks a significant step forward in making genetic testing simpler, cheaper and more accessible.”

Helen Firth, Professor of Clinical Genomics at the University of Cambridge, lead clinician and author of the study, said: “Under the current system, children often endure a lengthy, step-wise process of different genetic tests before reaching a diagnosis. This research brings hope that, in the near future, families might only need one test.”

Professor Matthew Hurles, Director of the Wellcome Sanger Institute and senior author of the study, said: “We are still learning how large-scale genetic variations impact human health. This study proves that with the right computational methods, a single test can accurately detect them. Our findings support its widespread adoption in NHS clinical practice, and the adequate bioinformatics training to support this.”