The technique, developed by scientists at the University of Sydney, could be a game-changer in the management of crop loss to mice plague. In 2021, NSW Farmers said the mice plague at the time could cause $1 billion of damage to Australian crops.

The research, published in Nature Sustainability, is led by PhD student Finn Parker, with co-authors Professor Peter Banks, Dr Catherine Price and Jenna Bytheway, from the Sydney Institute of Agriculture and School of Life and Environmental Sciences.

The team estimates that mice successfully steal 63 percent fewer wheat seeds, compared to untreated controls, if a wheat crop is sprayed with diluted wheat germ oil during and after sowing.

The researchers found that if the wheat plot was also sprayed with the same solution before planting, then seed loss reduced by an even better 74 percent. This, they say, is because the mice had learned to ignore unrewarding wheat odour by the time the crop is planted.

“We found we could reduce mice damage even during plague conditions simply by making it hard for mice to find their food, by camouflaging the seed odour. Because they’re hungry, they can’t spend all their time searching for food that’s hard to find,” Professor Banks said.

“When the smell of the seed is everywhere, they’ll just go and look for something else instead of being encouraged to dig. That’s because mice are precise foragers that can smell seeds in the ground and dig exactly where a seed is, but they can’t do that in this situation because everything smells like the seeds.

“This misinformation tactic could work well in other crop systems, indeed any animal that finds food by smell is potentially vulnerable to us manipulating that smell and undermining their ability to search.”

Mr Parker said the camouflage treatment could be an effective solution for wheat growers, given wheat’s brief vulnerability.

“The camouflage appeared to last until after the seeds germinated, which is the period of vulnerability when wheat needs to be protected,” he said.

“Most mouse damage occurs from when seeds are sown up to germination, just under two weeks later.

“Mice can’t evolve resistance to the method either because it uses the same odour that mice rely on to find wheat seeds.”

The research was conducted in May 2021 on a farm 10 kilometres north-west of Pleasant Hills, New South Wales, where five treatments were tested across 60 plots.

Two of the treatments involved the wheat germ oil solution. The other three treatments were controls, with plots covered in canola oil, trampled or left untreated. All control treatments performed similarly, receiving significantly more damage than treated plots.

Wheat germ oil is a relatively inexpensive by-product of the milling process. The authors said their solution, which contains only wheat germ oil diluted in water, offers a sustainable, non-lethal alternative to pesticides and baits.

“If people want to control mice but can’t get numbers down low enough, our technique can be a potent alternative to pesticides or add value to existing methods,” Dr Price said.

The research could aid wheat farmers at a crucial time. Mouse numbers are on the rise, and wheat is sowed in mid-autumn.

Next, the researchers plan to discover how diluted the concentration can be while effectively repelling mice, and how often the solution must be sprayed on a crop to remain effective.

The Department of Agriculture expects the value of Australian wheat to reach a record high of $15 billion this financial year.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham have launched the Bio-SPHERE project in a unique research facility located 1.1 km below the surface, in one of the deepest mine sites in the UK. The project investigates how scientific and medical operations would take place in the challenging environments of the Moon and Mars.

It is the first of a series of new laboratory facilities planned to study how humans might work — and stay healthy — during long space missions, a key requirement for ensuring mission continuity on other planets.

The team is working in partnership with the Boulby Underground Laboratory, a 4,000m³ deep underground facility focused on particle physics, Earth sciences and astrobiology research, run by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (part of UK Research and Innovation) with the support of the Boulby Mine operators, ICL-UK.

The Bio-SPHERE project is based in a 3,000m³ tunnel network adjacent to the Boulby Laboratory, which go through 250-million-year-old rock salt deposits, consisting of Permian evaporite layers left over from the Zechstein Sea. This geological environment, together with the deep subsurface location, have enabled researchers to recreate the operational conditions humans would experience working in similar caverns on the Moon and Mars. This includes remoteness, limited access to new materials and challenges in moving heavy equipment around.

At the same time, thanks to the ultra-low radiation environment provided by that depth, the location will enable scientists to investigate how effective underground habitats might be in protecting space crews from deep-space radiation, which is a significant risk in space exploration, as well as other hazards, such as falling debris from meteorites, which risks damaging the life-support infrastructure.

The first facility to be opened as part of Bio-SPHERE (Biomedical Sub-surface Pod for Habitability and Extreme-environments Research in Expeditions), is based in a 3-metre-wide simulation module and is designed specifically to test biomedical procedures needed to prepare materials for treating tissue damage. These include complex fluids, polymers and hydrogels for regenerative medicine that could be used, for example, in wound dressings, or fillers for damage mitigation.

A paper describing the concept and design of such a habitat was recently published in Nature (NPJ) Microgravity.

Bio-SPHERE, which includes a range of capabilities for sterile work and material processing, combines these simulation facilities and useful geological environment with access to the adjacent physics and chemistry laboratory facilities.

This environment provides the opportunity to simulate various mission scenarios and to conduct cutting edge, interdisciplinary science, ranging from the effects of extreme environments on biological and physicochemical parameters and on medical infrastructure, all the way to investigating how available ‘in-situ’ resources such as ambient pressure, temperature and geology can be used for habitat construction.

Lead researcher Dr Alexandra Iordachescu, in the University of Birmingham’s School of Chemical Engineering, said: “We are excited to be partnering with the fantastic science team at the Boulby Underground Laboratory. This new capability will help to gather information that can advise on the life support systems, devices and biomaterials which could be used in medical emergencies and tissue repair following damage in deep-space missions.

“These types of metrics can guide system design and help to assess the scientific needs and acceptable timeframes in bioengineering operations under the constraints of isolated environments, such as space habitats. The data is likely to bring numerous benefits for Earth-based applications as well, such as delivering biomedical interventions in remote areas or in hazardous environments and more generally, understanding biomedical workflows in these non-ideal environments.”

Professor Sean Paling, Director and Senior Scientist at the Boulby Underground laboratory said: “We are very pleased to be working with Dr Iordachescu and the team from the University of Birmingham on this exciting work. The challenges ahead for humankind in exploring habitats beyond Earth are clearly many and significant. The Bio-SPHERE project promises to help answer some key logistical questions in establishing sustainable living conditions in remote, subterranean environments and in doing so will significantly contribute to the essential preparations for our collective long, difficult and exciting journey ahead. It is also a great example of the diverse range of science studies that can be carried out in a deep underground science facility, and we are very happy to be hosting it.”

Tracing VOCs is important for public safety and all “smell” related issues. To this end, in Applied Physics Reviews, from AIP Publishing, Liu et al. introduced a fluid mechanics-based chamber design for an electronic nose (e-nose) that consistently detects VOCs at low concentrations. The strategy, which includes using a shuntlike device to control the behavior of fluid flow, is a step forward in e-nose technology development.

Methods for detecting VOCs face many challenges in terms of selectivity, sensitivity, reproducibility, and stability. E-noses, inspired by the olfactory system, can overcome some of these barriers by combining arrays of chemical sensors with pattern recognition techniques to recognize odors.

However, many e-noses generate different signals toward VOCs of the same concentration when the sensor is located in different parts of the “nose” chamber.

“To counteract this problem, the fluidic behavior of the gas flow needs to be well controlled,” said author Weiwei Wu. “This ensures a uniform fluidic field and concentration of VOCs in the chamber and avoids generating any fake sensing characteristics.”

The starting e-nose design featured a vertical chamber that looks much like a showerhead. This promotes vertical flow as gas spreads through holes at the bottom of the device and around to evenly distributed sensors.

Using fluid mechanics simulations, the team optimized the volume, symmetry, hole location, and sensor location of their e-nose chamber. They added a shuntlike device to promote fluid flow and shorten response time.

Based on their simulation results, the researchers fabricated a Teflon chamber and measured the sensing performance of their e-nose. They compared two chambers, one with the shunt and one without. The chamber with the shunt device consistently performed around 1.3 times better at sensing an example VOC.

In the future, the authors plan to focus on minimizing the chamber and improving the structure further to decrease response and recovery time.

“E-nose research is a highly interdisciplinary field,” said Wu. “Chemists, physicists, biologists, electronics engineers, and data scientists need to work together to solve issues including effective sensing that considers the fundamental mechanisms of absorption/desorption, algorithms that achieve precise recognition of VOCs more quickly and with lower energy consumption, and how new technologies, such as memristors, should be involved.”

Quantum networks connect quantum processors or quantum sensors with each other. This allows tap-proof communication and high-performance distributed sensor networks. Between network nodes, quantum information is exchanged by photons that travel through optical waveguides. Over long distances, however, the likelihood of photons being lost increases dramatically. As quantum information cannot simply be copied and amplified, 25 years ago Hans Briegel, Wolfgang Dür, Ignacio Cirac and Peter Zoller, then all at the University of Innsbruck, provided the blueprints for a quantum repeater. These feature light-matter entanglement sources and memories to create entanglement in independent network links that are connected between them by a so-called entanglement swap to finally distribute entanglement over long distances.

Even transmission over 800 kilometers possible

Quantum physicists led by Ben Lanyon from the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck have now succeeded in building the core parts of a quantum repeater — a fully functioning network node made with two single matter systems enabling entanglement creation with a photon at the standard frequency of the telecommunications network and entanglement swapping operations. The repeater node consists of two calcium ions captured in an ion trap within an optical resonator as well as single photon conversion to the telecom wavelength. The scientists thus demonstrated the transfer of quantum information over a 50-kilometer-long optical fiber, with the quantum repeater placed exactly halfway between starting and end point. The researchers were also able to calculate which improvements of this design would be necessary to make transmission over 800 kilometers possible which would allow to connect Innsbruck to Vienna.

The current results were published in Physical Review Letters. Funding for the research was provided by a START award from the Austrian Science Fund FWF, the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the European Union, among others. Lanyon’s team is part of the Quantum Internet Alliance, an international project under the EU Quantum Flagship.