Researchers from the University of California San Diego may help bring science fiction to reality by providing a divining rod to guide future space missions, including NASA’s Artemis campaign, which seeks to explore and, eventually, inhabit the moon. Their work appears in a special issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) called “Water on the Moon and Mars,” which features Artemis I on its cover.

The researchers included the father-son team of Mark Thiemens, UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Maxwell Thiemens, a research fellow at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, who is also an alumnus of Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

In 1967, Nobel laureate Harold Urey and James Arnold — both faculty members in UC San Diego’s Department of Chemistry — were among the first to receive Apollo 11 lunar samples. Urey was one of the first scientists to theorize that there was water on the moon, particularly in the permanently shadowed regions of the moon’s poles. Today, scientists believe that water on the moon originated from one of three sources:

• indigenous to the moon,
• created by solar winds (where hydrogen from the sun reacts with oxygen at high energy on the moon and likely Mars to create water)
• deposition (from icy comets that have crashed onto the lunar surface).

On Earth, human civilizations often bubble up near bodies of water and it would be no different in space. On the moon, it’s important to know the origin of the water sources because it will give astronauts guidance on where it would be most prudent to set up bases and habitats.

To learn about the origin of water on the moon, Morgan Nunn Martinez (who was a UC San Diego graduate student at the time) extracted very small amounts from lunar rocks collected from the 1969 Apollo 9 mission. It may sound implausible to get water from a rock, but it is possible through “thermal release,” a process where lunar samples were heated to 50, 150 and 1,000 degrees Celsius (122, 302, and 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit respectively). As it turns out, these rocks were surprisingly “wet.”

The lowest temperatures released lightly bound water molecules — those molecules that are attached to other molecules (in this case, lunar rock) through a weak attraction. At 1,000 degrees Celsius, tightly bound water molecules, which are more deeply embedded in the rock, were released.

Through this process, gas water molecules are collected, then purified so that only the oxygen remains. The team then measured the composition of three different oxygen isotopes.

Isotopes are atoms of the same element that have varying numbers of neutrons, which changes their mass — the more neutrons, the heavier the atom. These measurements are particularly useful in determining a substance’s origin and age.

Think of it like space forensics. In the way humans have unique fingerprints, astronomical objects, like comets and the sun, have unique signatures. Scientists are able to look at the oxygen isotope measurements and determine the origin of the water.

Their data revealed that most of the lunar water likely originated from the moon itself or from comet impacts. Contrary to popular belief, solar winds did not significantly contribute to the moon’s water stores.

“What’s nice about this research is that we’re using the most advanced scientific measurements and it supports common sense ideas about lunar water — much of it has been there since the beginning and more was added by these icy comet impacts,” stated Maxwell Thiemens. “The more complicated method of solar wind-derived water doesn’t appear to have been that productive.”

Although not a main thrust of the paper, the researchers also measured samples from Mars. If NASA’s Artemis program is able to successfully colonize humans on the moon, it would bode well for the ultimate mission of inhabiting Mars.

“This kind of work hasn’t been done before and we think it can provide NASA with some valuable clues about where water is located on the moon,” stated Mark Thiemens. “The real goal of Artemis is to get to Mars. Our research shows that likely there is at least as much water on Mars as on the moon, if not more.”

Of course, locating the water is only the first step. Being able to extract it from lunar rocks and soil in quantities large enough to sustain life will require further technological advancements and discovery.

Full list of authors: Maxwell Thiemens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Morgan Nunn Martinez and Mark Thiemens (UC San Diego).

This research was supported, in part, by a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship, a Zonta International Amelia Earhart Fellowship and the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Fellowship.

“We could target individual cells and explore how this affected their ability to stay healthy and functional,” says Chiara Musumeci, researcher at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics, LOE, at Linköping University.

The brain is controlled by electrical signals that are converted into chemical substances in the communication between the brain cells. It has long been known that different parts of the brain can be stimulated with the help of electricity. But methods are often imprecise and affect large parts of the brain. Sometimes, metal electrodes are needed to hit the right part of the brain, which entails a risk that the hard electrode instead damages the brain tissue, causing inflammation or scarring.

A solution for treating specific parts of the brain could involve conductive plastics, also known as polymers.

“The goal is to combine biological systems with electrodes, specifically using organic conductive polymers. As polymers are soft and conformable and can transport both electricity and ions, they are preferable to conventional electrodes,” says Chiara Musumeci.

Together with researchers at Karolinska Institutet, the research team at Campus Norrköping has succeeded in anchoring the conductive plastic to individual living cell membranes. This opens up for future precise treatments of neurological diseases.

“At the moment, our results are rather general, which is a good thing, as our future research can explore what types of diseases this important tool would be suitable for. But more research is needed before we can say anything with any certainty,” says Alex Bersellini Farinotti, researcher at Karolinska Institutet.

Previous attempts to anchor organic electronics at the cell surface have been made, but with genetically modified cells that make the membranes more receptive. In their present study, the researchers have not used genetically modified cells and yet managed to achieve a tight coupling without affecting the cell’s other functions. This is the first time this has been done.

To succeed, the researchers used a two-step process where an anchor molecule is first used to create an attachment point in the cell membrane. At the other end of the molecule is a structure where the polymer electrode itself can attach.

The next step in the research is to get a more evenly distributed and stable anchoring over the membrane and to see how the polymer coupling behaves over time. Hanne Biesmans is a doctoral student at LOE and believes that there is great potential but also many challenges left to solve.

“We have taken a big step forward now. But we can’t say with any certainty that it will work in living tissue. This is basic research, where we are now trying to figure out the way forward.”

Ocean temperatures were rising at about 0.06 degrees Celsius per decade in the late 1980s, but are now increasing at 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade.

Published today (Tuesday, 28 January 2025) in Environmental Research Letters, the study helps explain why 2023 and early 2024 saw unprecedented ocean temperatures.

Professor Chris Merchant, lead author at the University of Reading, said: “If the oceans were a bathtub of water, then in the 1980s, the hot tap was running slowly, warming up the water by just a fraction of a degree each decade. But now the hot tap is running much faster, and the warming has picked up speed. The way to slow down that warming is to start closing off the hot tap, by cutting global carbon emissions and moving towards net-zero.”

Energy imbalance

This accelerating ocean warming is driven by the Earth’s growing energy imbalance — whereby more energy from the Sun is being absorbed in the Earth system than is escaping back to space. This imbalance has roughly doubled since 2010, in part due to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, and because the Earth is now reflecting less sunlight to space than before.

Global ocean temperatures hit record highs for 450 days straight in 2023 and early 2024. Some of this warmth came from El Niño, a natural warming event in the Pacific. When scientists compared it to a similar El Niño in 2015-16, they found that the rest of the record warmth is explained by the sea surface warming up faster in the past 10 years than in earlier decades. 44% of the record warmth was attributable to the oceans absorbing heat at an accelerating rate.

Expect more warming

The findings show that the overall rate of global ocean warming observed over recent decades is not an accurate guide to what happens next: it is plausible that the ocean temperature increase seen over the past 40 years will be exceeded in just the next 20 years. Because the surface oceans set the pace for global warming, this matters for the climate as a whole. This accelerating warming underscores the urgency of reducing fossil fuel burning to prevent even more rapid temperature increases in the future and to begin to stabilise the climate.