The work heralds what the researcher hopes will be a new line of “functional foods” — edibles specially designed with health benefits. The aim is to develop healthier kinds of chocolate easily accessible to consumers.

Reporting in the scientific journal, Food Hydrocolloids, a Rutgers-led team of scientists described the successful creation and printing of a mixture producing low-fat chocolate — substituting fatty cocoa butter with a lower-fat, water-in-oil emulsion.

“Everybody likes to eat chocolate, but we are also concerned with our health,” said Qingrong Huang, a professor in the Department of Food Science at the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. “To address this, we have created a chocolate that is not only low-fat, but that can also be printed with a 3D printer. It’s our first ‘functional’ chocolate.”

Huang, an author of the study, said he already is working on manipulating sugar content in the new chocolate formulation for low-sugar and sugar-free varieties.

Researchers create emulsions by breaking down two immiscible liquids into minute droplets. In emulsions, the two liquids will usually quickly separate — as is the case with oil and vinegar — unless they are held together by a third, stabilizing ingredient known as an emulsifier. (An egg is the emulsifier in a vinaigrette.)

Chocolate candy is generally made with cocoa butter, cocoa powder and powdered sugar and combined with any one of a variety of different emulsifiers.

For the study, the scientific team experimented with different ratios of the ingredients for a standard chocolate recipe to find the best balance between liquid and solid for 3D printing. Seeking to lower the level of fat in the mixture, researchers created a water-in-cocoa butter emulsion held together by gum arabic, an extract from the acacia tree that is commonly used in the food industry, to replace the cocoa butter. The researchers mixed the emulsion with golden syrup to enhance the flavor and added that combination to the other ingredients.

As delightful as it is to eat, Huang said, chocolate is a material rich with aspects for food scientists to explore.

Employing advanced techniques examining the molecular structure and physical properties of chocolate, researchers investigated the printed chocolate’s physical characteristics. They were seeking the proper level of viscosity for printing and looking for the optimal texture and smoothness “for a good mouthfeel,” Huang said. Experimenting with many different water-oil ratios, they varied the percentages of all the main ingredients before settling on one mixture.

In 3D printing, a printer is used to create a physical object from a digital model by laying down layers of material in quick succession. The 3D printer, and the shapes it produces, can be programmed by an app on a cellphone, Huang said.

Ultimately, Huang said he plans to design functional foods containing healthy added ingredients — substances he has spent more than two decades studying, such as extracts from orange peel, tea, red pepper, onion, Rosemary, turmeric, blueberry and ginger — that consumers can print and eat.

“3D food printing technology enables the development of customized edible products with tailored taste, shape and texture as well as optimal nutrition based on consumer needs,” Huang said.

Other researchers on the study included Siqi You and Xuanxuan Lu of the Department of Food Science and Engineering at Jinan University in Guangzhou, China.

The study, which builds on well-established research of early language development in toddlers 12 months and older, found that the infants who received consistent, daily reading of at least one book a day, starting at two weeks of age, demonstrated improved language scores as early as nine months of age. The findings were published in December in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, the official peer-reviewed journal of the American Board of Family Medicine.

During the randomized study, parents/guardians were given a set of 20 children’s books specifically chosen to support early language development and interaction with print media. Enrolled families agreed to read at least one book per day and have their infants tested with an expressive and receptive language test at their well-child visits.

“One book each day is an easy goal for new families to try. To see that there is a measurable improvement in speaking and understanding before one year old is very exciting,” said Adam M. Franks, M.D., professor of family and community health at the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine and corresponding author on the study.

In addition to Franks, physicians Callie Seaman, M.D., and William Rollyson, M.D., and researcher Todd Davies, Ph.D., teamed with Emily K. Franks, a speech-language pathologist, to co-author the article.

“While our team is excited about our findings, the real winners are the participating children and families in this area that have been benefited from the bonding experience of experiencing this co-reading through their participation in the project,” Franks said.

The authors hope to expand this research to assess the benefits in infants of mothers with opioid use disorder who are suffering from withdrawal.

This work is supported by a rural research grant from the Robert C. Byrd Center for Rural Health.

The Zhurong rover was sent to Mars as part of China’s Tianwen-1 mission. Launched in July 2020, the rover landed on the surface on 15 May 2021. The rover was sent to a large plain in the northern hemisphere of Mars named Utopia Planitia, near the boundary between the lowlands where it landed and highlands to the south. The region was chosen because it’s near suspected ancient shorelines and other interesting surface features, where the rover could look for evidence of water or ice. A large body of underground ice was identified in a nearby part of Utopia Planitia in 2016 by radar from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. After landing, the Zhurong rover traveled about 1.9 km south, taking pictures of rocks, sand dunes, and impact craters, and collecting ground-penetrating radar data along the way.

Ground-penetrating radar detects features underground by sending electromagnetic pulses into the ground that are reflected back by any subsurface structures it passes over. The Zhurong rover uses two radar frequencies — a lower frequency that reaches deeper (~80 meters) with less detail, and a higher frequency used for the latest study, which shows more detailed features but only reaches ~4.5 meters down. Researchers hope that imaging the subsurface of Mars will help to shed light on the planet’s geologic history, previous climate conditions, and any water or ice the planet may host now or in the past.

The researchers saw several curving and dipping underground structures in the Martian soil that they identify as buried impact craters, as well as other sloping features with less certain origins. They did not see any evidence of water or ice in the top five meters of soil. Radar images of the deeper structures revealed layers of sediment left by episodes of flooding and deposition in the past, but also found no evidence of water in the present day. This does not rule out the possibility of water deeper than the eighty meters imaged with the radar.

In the new paper, the researchers contrast the data from Mars with ground-penetrating radar previously collected from the moon, which shows a much different shallow subsurface structure. Where the shallow Martian surface contains several distinct features that show up in the radar, the top 10 meters of the moon has fine layers but no evidence of other structures like impact crater walls, despite also being subjected to meteorite bombardment. The walls of impact craters are, however, observed at greater depths on the moon, buried beneath the 10-meter-thick layer of fine debris.

The difference may be in the atmosphere — while Mars’ atmosphere is a meager 1% of the volume of Earth’s, the moon has virtually no atmosphere. With essentially no atmospheric protection, the moon’s surface is bombarded by more of the smallest micrometeorites that rework the surface, eroding smaller-scale features and leaving behind fine layers of ejecta. By contrast, the surface of Mars is not being subjected to as many micrometeorite impacts because these smaller objects burn up in the atmosphere. In the regions imaged by Zhurong, burial by wind-blown sediment may have also protected the impact craters from erosion. One of the craters imaged had its rim exposed at the surface, but the other crater was buried.

Yi Xu, the lead author on the study, explains, “We found a lot of dunes on the surface at the landing site, so maybe this crater was quickly buried by the sand and then this cover reduced space weathering, so we can see the full shape of these craters walls.”

Just like your future body will thank you for the apple, your future ears (specifically your cochlear hair cells) will thank you for protecting them. The most common cause of hearing loss is progressive because these hair cells — the primary cells to detect sound waves — cannot regenerate if damaged or lost. People who have repeated exposure to loud noises, like military personnel, construction workers, and musicians, are most at risk for this type of hearing loss. But, it can happen to anyone over time (even concert goers).

On the other hand, birds and fish can regenerate these hair cells, and now researchers at the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience are getting closer to identifying the mechanisms that may promote this type of regeneration in mammals, as explained in research recently published in Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience.

“We know from our previous work that expression of an active growth gene, called ERBB2, was able to activate the growth of new hair cells (in mammals), but we didn’t fully understand why,” said Patricia White, PhD, professor of Neuroscience and Otolaryngology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. The 2018 study led by Jingyuan Zhang, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the White lab at the time, found that activating the growth gene ERBB2 pathway triggered a cascading series of cellular events by which cochlear support cells began to multiply and activate other neighboring stem cells to become new sensory hair cells.

“This new study tells us how that activation is happening — a significant advance toward the ultimate goal of generating new cochlear hair cells in mammals,” said White.

Using single-cell RNA sequencing in mice, researchers compared cells with an overactive growth gene (ERBB2 signaling) with similar cells that lacked such signaling. They found the growth gene — ERBB2 — promoted stem cell-like development by initiating the expression of multiple proteins — including SPP1, a protein that signals through the CD44 receptor. The CD44 receptor is known to be present in cochlear-supporting cells. This increase in cellular response promoted mitosis in the supporting cells, a key event for regeneration.

“When we checked this process in adult mice, we were able to show that ERBB2 expression drove the protein expression of SPP1 that is necessary to activate CD44 and grow new hair cells,” said Dorota Piekna-Przybylska, PhD, a staff scientist in the White Lab and first author of the study. “This discovery has made it clear that regeneration is not only restricted to the early stages of development. We believe we can use these findings to drive regeneration in adults.”

“We plan to further investigation of this phenomenon from a mechanistic perspective to determine whether it can improve auditory function after damage in mammals. That is the ultimate goal,” said White.

Additional authors include Daxiang Na, Cameron Baker, and John Ashton, PhD, at the University of Rochester and Medical Center. The research was supported by the U.S. Army Medical Research Mechanism, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, UR Ventures, and the Schmitt Program on Integrative Neuroscience.