“We are making those lines glow-in-the-dark so that they are more detectable, so the sensitivity of the test is better,” said Richard Willson, Huffington-Woestemeyer Professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and professor of biochemical and biophysical sciences, who previously created a COVID smartphone-based app and test kit based on the technology underlying home pregnancy tests.

The first idea for glow-in-the-dark technology sprang from a star pasted on the ceiling of Willson’s young daughter’s bedroom. One night while he was putting her to sleep, he peered at the glow-in-the-dark star and his mind began to wander, applying its principles to science. Within days Willson and his team of students and postdocs was creating a test with glowing nanoparticles made of phosphors, which would make the particles even more detectable and the tests more accurate. Two of the students became the founders of Luminostics (now called Clip Health), a spinoff from the Willson lab).

Now in the Willson lab, the next generation is developing.

“In this new development, there are two tricks. First, we use enzymes, proteins that catalyze reactions, to drive reactions that emit light, like a firefly. Second, we attached those light-emitting enzymes onto harmless virus particles, along with antibodies that bind to COVID proteins,” reports Willson in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s journal Analyst.

The reason these steps are useful is that one antibody on a virus can bind to one COVID target on the test strip and bring along with it many light-emitting enzymes. So, the team gets more light for each target, thus needing fewer targets to see the light, making the test more sensitive.

And while you might be able to read the results with your eye in a very dark room, the Willson team created a little plastic box to exclude light and let a smartphone camera do the reading.

“This is more reproducible and probably more sensitive, and with smartphones you can communicate the results to databases and things like that,” said the paper’s corresponding author Katerina Kourentzi, University of Houston research associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. Jacinta Conrad, Frank M. Tiller Associate Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, also from the William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Houston Cullen College of Engineering, is on team. Others from UH include the first author of the paper Maede Chabi, Binh Vu, Kristen Brosamer, Maxwell Smith and Dimple Chavan.

Willson adds the sensitivity is really excellent, better than essentially any commercial tests, making the technology useful in an array of medical arenas.

“This technology can be used for detecting all kinds of other things, including flu and HIV, but also Ebola and biodefense agents, and maybe toxins and environmental contaminants and pesticides in food,” said Willson.

So truly, the sky — and stars — are the limit.

Researchers are coming to understand that the best performing materials in sustainable energy applications, such as converting sunlight or waste heat to electricity, often use collective fluctuations of clusters of atoms within a much larger structure. This process is often referred to as “dynamic disorder.”

Dynamic disorder

Understanding dynamic disorder in materials could lead to more energy-efficient thermoelectric devices, such as solid-state refrigerators and heat pumps, and also to better recovery of useful energy from waste heat, such as car exhausts and power station exhausts, by converting it directly to electricity. A thermoelectric device was able to take heat from radioactive plutonium and convert it to electricity to power the Mars Rover when there was not enough sunlight.

When materials function inside an operating device, they can behave as if they are alive and dancing — parts of the material respond and change in amazing and unexpected ways. This dynamic disorder is difficult to study because the clusters are not only so small and disordered, but they also fluctuate in time. In addition, there is “boring” non-fluctuating disorder in materials that researchers aren’t interested in because the disorder doesn’t improve properties. Until now, it has been impossible to see the relevant dynamic disorder from the background of less relevant static disorder.

New “camera” has incredibly fast shutter speed of around 1 picosecond

Researchers at Columbia Engineering and Université de Bourgogne report that they have developed a new kind of “camera” that can see the local disorder. Its key feature is a variable shutter speed: because the disordered atomic clusters are moving, when the team used a slow shutter, the dynamic disorder blurred out, but when they used a fast shutter, they could see it. The new method, which they call variable shutter PDF or vsPDF (for atomic pair distribution function), doesn’t work like a conventional camera — it uses neutrons from a source at the U.S. Department of Energy’sOak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to measure atomic positions with a shutter speed of around one picosecond, or a million million (a trillion) times faster than normal camera shutters. The study was published February 20, 2023, by Nature Materials.

“It’s only with this new vsPDF tool that we can really see this side of materials,” said Simon Billinge, professor of materials science and applied physics and applied mathematics. “It gives us a whole new way to untangle the complexities of what is going on in complex materials, hidden effects that can supercharge their properties. With this technique, we’ll be able to watch a material and see which atoms are in the dance and which are sitting it out.”

New theory on stabilizing local fluctuations and converting waste heat to electricity

The vsPDF tool enabled the researchers to find atomic symmetries being broken in GeTe, an important material for thermoelectricity that converts waste heat to electricity (or electricity into cooling). They hadn’t previously been able to see the displacements, or to show the dynamic fluctuations and how quickly they fluctuated. As a result of the insights from vsPDF, the team developed a new theory that shows just how such local fluctuations can form in GeTe and related materials. Such a mechanistic understanding of the dance will help researchers to look for new materials with these effects and to apply external forces to influence the effect, leading to even better materials.

Research team

Billlinge’s co-lead on this work with Simon Kimber, who was at the University of Bourgogne in France at the time of the study. Billinge and Kimber worked with colleagues at ORNL and the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), also funded by the DOE. The Inelastic neutron scattering measurements for the vsPDF camera were made at ORNL; the theory was done at ANL.

Next steps

Billinge is now working on making his technique easier to use for the research community and applying it to other systems with dynamic disorder. At the moment, the technique is not turn-key, but with further development, it should become a much more standard measurement that could be used on many material systems where atomic dynamics are important, from watching lithium moving around in battery electrodes to studying dynamic processes during water-splitting with sunlight.

The researchers isolated plots within natural ecosystems and separated the plots from accessing plant roots with a plastic barrier (a technique known as ‘root trenching’). Their study included rainforest, as well as both rubber and oil palm plantations in Sumatra, Indonesia. As a comparison, they removed all dead leaves, the main resource of decomposer animals, from other experimental plots. They found that without living roots, animal abundance in the rainforest plots decreases by 42 percent and in plantations by 30 percent. By contrast, removing the dead leaves has almost no effect on the animals in the underlying soil, but decreased the total animal abundance (in the soil and dead leaves) by 60 percent in rainforest and rubber plantations due to physical litter removal. However, the effects of plant litter removal were not observed in oil palm plantations, where litter is very scarce in any case. The study also revealed that living roots are especially important for the smaller soil animals, such as mites and springtails. Interestingly, after adding artificial plastic leaves in oil palm plantations, abundance of some animal groups — such as prostigmata — increased, highlighting that improving habitat structure, for instance by mulching, can promote soil food networks and the services they provide.

“The study provides novel perspectives for the management of the resources provided by plant litter in tropical plantations, fostering soil animal biodiversity. This is important to develop sustainable agricultural landscapes in the tropics,” says Professor Stefan Scheu, head of the Animal Ecology Working Group at the University of Göttingen.

“This study’s findings are significant not only for the conservation of tropical soil biodiversity, but also for the development of global ecosystem models describing carbon cycling in the tropics. We need a better understanding of the complex ecological systems that support life on Earth,” adds Dr Anton Potapov, Soil Biodiversity and Functions at German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), Halle-Jena-Leipzig.

However, variations between countries grouped into regions according to socioeconomic development and geographic proximity suggest that while mainly benefitting women’s lives and health at first, progress in gender equality helps men to live longer too, eventually narrowing the gender gap in life expectancy.

Lead author Dr Cat Pinho-Gomes, Honorary Research Fellow at The George Institute for Global Health, UK in partnership with Imperial College London, said the results — published in the lead up to International Women’s Day — suggest that addressing longstanding gender inequality and empowering women might help extend longevity for both women and men.

“Many of the factors that determine how long you will live — like working and living conditions, exposure to pollution, access to health care, education, income, and social support — are layered with gender differences around the world,” she said.

“As countries make greater progress towards gender equality and women are afforded the opportunity to participate more fully in in political, economic, and social life, the whole of society reaps the rewards.”

According to the latest report by the World Economic Forum, global events such as the rising cost of living, the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate emergency and large-scale conflict and displacement are stalling progress towards gender parity. This may, in turn, jeopardise socioeconomic development and improvement in living and working conditions, curbing the gains in life expectancy that have occurred over the past decades.

To investigate whether gender equality was associated with life expectancy (LE) for women and men and assess the gender gap in life expectancy across the globe, the researchers used a modified global gender gap index (mGGGI), based on the index developed by the World Economic Forum (WEF), and applied it across 156 countries between 2010 and 2021.

The WEF’s Global Gender Gap Index benchmarks the current state and evolution of gender parity across four key dimensions (Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment). For this study, the health dimension was excluded because it includes healthy life expectancy, which was the subject of this study.

Among the three dimensions included in this study (i.e., political, economic, and educational), gender equality in education had the strongest association with longer LE for both women and men.

“This suggests investing in education is paramount, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, where many girls are still denied access to education and resources are limited,” added Dr Pinho-Gomes.

“Even high-income countries — where substantial progress has been made to address gender inequalities in recent years — investing in gender equality may still benefit life expectancy, particularly for men. This study confirmed what we had already seen for countries in the EU using a different index, reinforcing the validity of our findings.”

“The weaker association between gender equality in the political domain and the gender gap in LE raises concerns about how gender equality is being implemented by political systems worldwide,” she said.

“As we’ve seen from the recent resignations of high-profile female politicians, women still experience significant challenges in this field, including discrimination, balancing private, family and political life, gaining support from political parties, and securing campaign funding.”

Overall, in 2021, each ten percent increase in the mGGGI was associated with a 4.3-month increase in women’s LE and a 3.5-month increase in men’s LE, leading to an 8-month wider gender gap, but there was considerable variation between geographical regions.

“Our study has important implications for policy makers across the globe, particularly as the world gradually recovers from the myriad shocks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which had a gendered impact across multiple domains of life,” added Dr Pinho-Gomes.

“This International Women’s Day, let’s not forget that the evidence demonstrates that enhancing women’s representation across multiple sectors contributes to wealthier and, hence, healthier societies for all.”

“In a drop of seawater, there will be about 1,000 to 10,000 E. huxleyi cells, and about 10 million viruses,” said Kay Bidle, a professor in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences (SEBS) and a senior author on the study. “They’re all in a sort of arms race against each other and we are studying it to see how it plays out and impacts Earth’s carbon cycle.”

Reporting in Science Advances, the researchers said they discovered, through observations both in the ocean and in the laboratory, that the chalk (calcium carbonate) plates, called coccoliths, are a previously unrealized central player in viral infections that can collapse phytoplankton blooms the size of some countries within weeks.

“Coccoliths can act as catalysts for death, delivering viruses directly to algae cells for successful infection,” said Christopher Johns, a doctoral student in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences at SEBS and lead author on the study.

E. huxleyi is a one-celled species of phytoplankton, which, like trees, performs photosynthesis. In the case of phytoplankton, they convert carbon dioxide dissolved in ocean water into organic compounds, and at the same time produce oxygen.

“The phytoplankton in the oceans contribute about half of Earth’s oxygen, with the other half coming from land plants,” Bidle said. “Every other breath you take is from phytoplankton.”

E. huxleyi is well-known for its ability to biomineralize calcium carbonate, similar to corals, by producing coccoliths, which are arranged on the cell surface to form an armored layer. These coccoliths are produced and then shed into the surrounding seawater in a continuous cycle.

For years, the function of these coccoliths has been poorly understood, according to Bidle. Researchers believed the chalk armor existed in part to protect phytoplankton from getting infected by viruses. And the discarded, free coccoliths were commonly thought of as passively drifting planktonic particles with little biological or ecological roles.

But in experiments conducted in laboratories on the Cook campus at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Johns and other team members observed that the expelled coccoliths can find their way back to the E. huxleyi cells, reattach, and at the same time ferry viral particles, facilitating infection. This ability to propagate and catalyze infection is one unexpected role of the coccoliths with important potential ecosystem outcomes.

The discovery also has an important connection to climate change and the Earth’s carbon cycle, Bidle said. Infected E. huxleyi cells produce a sticky glue that can help aggregate particles into what is called “marine snow.” When marine snow sinks to the deep ocean, it helps to sequester and bury carbon, removing it from the atmosphere for centuries to millennia. Coccoliths are important in this process because they are heavier than seawater and help make particles sink faster and more rapidly into the deep ocean.

By assisting in the death of the phytoplankton, as well as in marine snow formation and sinking, the coccolith biominerals can ultimately have a positive impact on the removal of carbon dioxide from the upper ocean and atmosphere, Bidle said.

“This means the coccoliths facilitate the process of sequestering or sinking carbon into the deep ocean for thousands of years, making them important players in balancing the Earth’s carbon cycle,” Bidle said.

Other Rutgers researchers on the study include Associate Professor Heidi Fuchs; Karen Grace Bondoc-Naumovitz, a former postdoctoral fellow now at the University of Exeter in England; and Alexandra Matthews, a former undergraduate student, all within the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences.

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of North Carolina-Wilmington also were involved in the study.