So, Let’s delve into the new scientific research that happened in the past month or so and explore the latest technologies that are being created and breakthroughs that were achieved in this field.
In current blog, you will read about the following science events of the month:
- Norwegian government approves deep sea mining; raising eye brows!
- Japan hit by powerful earthquakes
- Japan becomes the Fifth country to land on moon in most precise ever landing
- Ingenuity helicopter; First copter to fly over Mars perishes
- China inaugurates biggest and deepest ever Dark matter lab
- Google AI better at conducting medical interviews & making diagnosis
- Fossils dating back 1.75 billion years may help us understand photosynthesis
- A novel technique enables cardiac repairs to progress along with age in children
- DNA from prehistoric Europeans shows unexpected migration patterns and roots of multiple sclerosis
- Weird RNA bits named as ‘Obelisks’ discovered in Human mouth and guts
- Physics behind Moths manoeuvre around the light revealed
- Scientists reveal why our Urine is Yellowish in colour
- Huge sea curtains proposed to stop Glacial melting
- KAUST in Saudi Arabia releases largest ever catalogue of oceanic DNA
- AI and Robotics used to create automated lab that can design Proteins
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| Current Science Report: January 2024, Mufawad |
Norwegian government approves deep sea mining; raising eye brows
In 2018, Norway and Palau (A small country in Ocenia) co-chaired the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy (now called the Ocean Panel), which aimed to sustainably manage 100% of their exclusive economic zones (national waters) by 2025. The panel's leaders backed five priorities proposed by its science advisers, including ways to decarbonize the shipping industry and manage seafood production sustainably.
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In 2021, Norway elected a new government and last week, its parliament voted to allow the controversial practice of sea-bed mining, going against the advice of the Norwegian Environment Agency, the Ocean Panel’s scientific advisers, and other researchers.
Scientists argue that too little is known about the deep-sea ecosystem, such as its biodiversity and interactions with other ecosystems, to safely mine the sea floor. Researchers also question Norway’s suggestion that sea-bed mining will strengthen the country’s economy and that terrestrial supplies of metals such as lithium, scandium, manganese and cobalt are insufficient to support the transition to a low-carbon economy.
However, the vote only allows companies to explore whether critical minerals, such as sulfide and manganese, on the sea floor could be extracted profitably. Commercial-scale mining will require another parliamentary vote, a compromise the government agreed on to gain support from other political parties.
Astrid Bergmål, the secretary of state for the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy, told Nature that the vote “does not mean extraction starts” immediately. Norway will ensure that its sea-bed activity is in line with its international obligations, including the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the 1992 UN Convention on Biological Diversity.
In hindsight, signs to the contrary were already there by 2021, with the Norwegian government first announcing its intention to mine minerals on the sea floor and continuing to issue permits for offshore oil and gas drilling.
It is pertinent to mention here that proposal to open up its 280,000 sq km of its national waters for companies puts the country at odds with the EU and the UK, which have called for a temporary ban on the practice due to concerns about environmental damage.
Techniques to harvest the minerals from the sea floor could generate significant noise and light pollution, as well as damage to the habitat of organisms relying on the nodules, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
In November last year, 120 EU lawmakers wrote an open letter calling on the Norwegian parliament to reject the project because of "the risk of such activity to marine biodiversity and the acceleration of climate change". The letter also said the impact assessment conducted by Norway had too many knowledge gaps.
Campaigners also argue that more investment should go into recycling and reusing the existing minerals we have mined on land. The Environmental Justice Foundation estimates that 16,000 tonnes of cobalt per year, about 10% of annual production, could be recovered through improved collection and recycling of mobile phones.
Courtesy: Nature, BBC
Japan hit by powerful earthquakes
A series of powerful earthquakes hit the west coast of Japan, causing hundreds of deaths and destroying many buildings. The magnitude-7.6 earthquake hit Ishikawa prefecture on January 1, 2024, making it the strongest quake to occur in the prefecture in over a century. The tsunami warnings were issued, with ocean waves reaching more than 1 meter high in some areas along the coastline. The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) recorded 146 smaller earthquakes on Ishikawa's Noto Peninsula, including one measured by the US Geological Survey (USGS) at a magnitude of 6.2. The tremors have resulted in more than 100 deaths, with reports of dozens more expected as rescue teams search through the rubble.
Japan is one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world, as it sits on top of four converging tectonic plates that constantly grind together. Most major earthquakes in Japan are caused by the Pacific Plate off the east coast, which slides beneath another plate. This subduction was the driving force behind Japan's largest ever recorded earthquake, a magnitude-9.1 quake that struck the Tohoku region in 2011 and triggered a massive tsunami.
Ishikawa itself is no stranger to earthquakes, with more than 500 occurring since 2020. In May 2023, the USGS measured a magnitude-6.3 earthquake that shook the region and destroyed dozens of buildings.
Japan has improved its earthquake early-warning systems since the 2011 Tohoku event, but aftershocks have made it difficult for rescue teams to retrieve trapped people and could cause further damage to already weakened structures. The frequency of aftershocks is expected to decrease in the coming days, but more earthquakes are likely to hit the region.
Courtesy: The Nature
Japan becomes the Fifth country to land on moon in most precise ever landing
Japan has become the fifth country to soft-land a spacecraft on the Moon using precision technology, allowing it to touch down closer to its target landing site than any mission has before. The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) touched down in its target area near Shioli crater, south of the lunar equator, early Saturday morning. It landed four months after lifting off from the Tanegashima Space Centre, off the south coast of mainland Japan.
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The successful landing comes around two weeks after the launch of a commercial US spacecraft destined for the Moon, but a propellant problem will probably prevent this spacecraft from landing as planned.
It’s also been almost a year since a Japanese commercial lander experienced a failure and crashed into the Moon; lunar landings are notoriously difficult to pull off, and a commercial company has yet to do so.
SLIM is likely to have achieved its primary goal — to land on the Moon with an unprecedented accuracy of 100 meters, which is a big leap from previous ranges of a few to dozens of kilometers. It used vision-based navigation technology, which was intended to image the surface as it flew over the Moon and could locate itself quickly by matching the images with onboard maps.
It remains unclear whether the car-sized, 200-kilogram spacecraft actually touched down in the planned two-step manner. Previous craft landed on four legs simultaneously on a relatively flat area of the Moon. SLIM was designed to hit a 15-degree slope outside Shioli crater first with one leg at the back of the craft before tipping forward and stabilizing on the four front legs.
Scientists plan to use a specialized camera on SLIM — the only scientific instrument onboard — to look for a mineral called olivine in the Moon’s mantle. If we can detect the olivine’s components and compare it with its counterpart on Earth, it may offer new evidence to support the theory that the Moon was part of Earth long time ago.
SLIM makes Asia shine in the new Moon race, but it might also intensify the competition between spacefaring nations in the region. Now that both India and Japan have created technologies to achieve soft landings on the Moon, their planned joint mission, known as the Lunar Polar Exploration Mission, could rival China’s Chang’e-7 mission, which aims to land in the lunar south pole region in 2026 and look for ice.
Courtesy: The Nature
Ingenuity helicopter; First helicopter to fly over Mars perishes
NASA's Ingenuity helicopter, the first aircraft to fly on another world, has died during its 72nd flight in Jezero Crater on Mars. The box-shaped drone, built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), was a trailblazer for interplanetary spacecraft, allowing powered flight in thin atmospheres of other worlds. It accompanied NASA's Perseverance rover to Mars, where they landed in February 2021 and began studying Jezero.
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Ingenuity was supposed to make five flights and last about a month, but it traversed 17 kilometers of the red planet and flew for nearly 129 minutes between 2021 and 2024. During its final journey, something fatal happened, possibly due to the rotor blades striking the ground. An image taken of the ground after the flight ended shows the shadow of one of the blades, with at least one-quarter missing. The helicopter can still communicate with Earth, but it will not fly again.
Future planetary missions might use the aerial lessons learned from Ingenuity, as this type of mobility can take us to places we never dreamed we'd be able to explore. NASA is already building an eight-rotor helicopter to explore Saturn's moon Titan, a mission that will launch as early as 2028. Engineers at JPL are working on advanced helicopter designs for future Mars missions that could carry large payloads and explore places such as cliffs and canyons that other spacecraft cannot reach.
Courtesy: The Nature
China inaugurates biggest and deepest ever Dark matter lab
The China Jinping Underground Laboratory (CJPL) in southwest China has opened its second phase, CJPL-II, with a capacity of 330,000 cubic meters, surpassing the Gran Sasso National Laboratory (LNGS) in Italy. The extra space has allowed experiments such as the Particle and Astrophysical Xenon Experiments (PandaX) and the China Dark Matter Experiment (CDEX) to upgrade.
Dark matter remains a scientific mystery, as it is thought to be the invisible glue holding the Universe together. Attempts to detect dark matter on Earth's surface are "like trying to hear the tiny voice of a child inside a stadium where everybody's shouting," says Marco Selvi, a physicist at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Bologna, Italy.
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CJPL-II is exposed to cosmic rays at 0.000001% the rate of Earth's surface, making it one of the best-shielded underground labs in the world. Its walls are also coated in a 10-centimetre-thick protective shield made from a mix of rubber, concrete, and other materials that block water and radioactive radon gas, which can seep in from the surrounding rock and disrupt dark-matter detection experiments.
The PandaX (Particle and Astrophysical Xenon Experiments) team upgraded its detector, called PandaX-4T, from a capacity of 120 kilograms of liquid xenon to 4 tonnes while CJPL-II was being built. The detector is catching up to LNGS's (Gran Sasso National Laboratory) XENONnT experiment (8.6 tonnes) and the LUX-ZEPLIN Experiment (7 tonnes), at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota.
The PandaX-4T detector sits inside a 900-cubic-metre tank of water to shield it even more from stray particles. The team's ultimate goal is to build a xenon detector with a capacity of 40–50 tonnes, which would rival Europe's DARWIN Experiment, which is aiming for 40 tonnes.
The team has also deployed a germanium detector, which targets potential dark-matter particles with an even lower mass than the ones xenon experiments are looking for. The detector has been upgraded from a capacity of 1 kilogram to 10 kilograms of germanium, with plans to build a detector array that contains one tonne. If a dark-matter particle slammed into this detector, the interaction should produce charges, which would be converted into electrical signals.
Scientists at CJPL-II hope to invite more international collaborators to join them, which already includes researchers from India and Turkey. The search for dark matter is globally competitive, having several underground labs around the world running similar experiments allows researchers to compare their results.
Courtesy: The Nature
Google AI better at conducting medical interviews & making diagnosis
An artificial intelligence (AI) system called Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE) trained to conduct medical interviews matched, or even surpassed, human doctors' performance at conversing with simulated patients and listing possible diagnoses based on the patients' medical history.
The chatbot, based on a large language model (LLM) developed by Google, was more accurate than board-certified primary-care physicians in diagnosing respiratory and cardiovascular conditions, among others. It managed to acquire a similar amount of information during medical interviews and ranked higher on empathy. This is the first time that a conversational AI system has ever been designed optimally for diagnostic dialogue and taking the clinical history.
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The Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE) is still purely experimental and has not been tested on people with real health problems — only on actors trained to portray people with medical conditions. The authors argue that the chatbot could eventually play a part in democratizing health care. However, it should not replace interactions with physicians, as medicine is just so much more than collecting information — it’s all about human relationships.
One challenge facing the developers was a shortage of real-world medical conversations available to use as training data. To address that challenge, the researchers devised a way for the chatbot to train on its own ‘conversations’. The researchers did an initial round of fine-tuning the base LLM with existing real-world data sets, such as electronic health records and transcribed medical conversations.
To train the model further, the researchers prompted the LLM to play the part of a person with a specific condition, and that of an empathetic clinician aiming to understand the person’s history and devise potential diagnoses.
To test the system, researchers enlisted 20 people who had been trained to impersonate patients and got them to have online text-based consultations — both with AMIE and with 20 board-certified clinicians. They were not told whether they were chatting with a human or a bot. The AI system matched or surpassed the physicians’ diagnostic accuracy in all six medical specialties considered.
Courtesy: The Nature
Researchers have discovered photosynthetic structures inside fossils of cyanobacteria that are 1.75 billion years old, providing clues into how photosynthesis evolved. The discovery was made from fossils collected from three sites: the McDermott Formation in Australia, the Grassy Bay Formation in Canada, and the Bllc6 formation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Fossils dating back 1.75 billion years may help us understand photosynthesis
Researchers have discovered photosynthetic structures inside fossils of cyanobacteria that are 1.75 billion years old, providing clues into how photosynthesis evolved. The discovery was made from fossils collected from three sites: the McDermott Formation in Australia, the Grassy Bay Formation in Canada, and the Bllc6 formation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
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The researchers extracted fossilized cyanobacteria, which produce energy through photosynthesis, from these rocks. They found that the cyanobacteria from Australia and Canada contained thylakoids, or membrane-bound sacs where photosynthesis occurs. These are the oldest fossilised thylakoids that we know of today.
This is important because not all cyanobacteria have thylakoids, and it is unclear when these structures first evolved. The oldest fossils of cyanobacteria are about 2 billion years old, though other evidence, like geochemical signatures, indicate photosynthesis has been around for even longer than that. It is widely believed that cyanobacteria drove the accumulation of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere 2.4 billion years ago.
Now that the researchers have found oldest ever thylakoids and that they remained preserved in very old rocks, they think that they could go further back in time and try to test this hypothesis.
Courtesy: New Scientist
A novel technique enables cardiac repairs to progress along with age in children
Owen Monroe, the first person in the world to receive a partial heart transplant at 18 days old boy, has made history by becoming the first person in the world to receive such a procedure. His groundbreaking surgery, performed in 2022, even captured the attention of Hollywood scriptwriters who wove his story into a recent episode of the medical drama "Grey's Anatomy."
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A study published in the journal JAMA will document another milestone: for the first time, the tissue used to fix Owen's heart has grown, a long-sought goal of this type of repair.
At the time of his first operation, Owen's heart was the size of a strawberry. Today, at 20 months of age, it's about the size of an apricot – and the new valves and blood vessels have kept up with his growth, which means unlike most children born with the same defect, he may not need to have more risky heart surgeries throughout his life.
Researchers have been working to make growing heart valves a reality through tissue engineering, germinating them from cells in a lab. That approach had worked in animals, but it had not yet panned out in humans.
The procedure is catching on quickly, with 12 other partial heart transplants performed in children since Owen's surgery, including nine at Duke Health, the hospital that developed the operation. The technique has also enabled "domino transplants" and split-root transplants, which allow a single donor heart to save the lives of two critically ill infants.
In a domino transplant, the first child, born with a weak heart muscle that can't adequately pump blood, gets a whole donated heart while the second baby gets the healthy blood vessels and valves from the first infant. In a split-root transplant, the functioning parts of a heart are donated to two infants.
Dr. Joseph Turek, chief of pediatric heart surgery at Duke Health and the surgeon who created the partial heart transplant, believes that it could help hundreds of children every year in the US. He believes that that, ultimately, it will be limited by the number of donors. There are 500 pediatric heart transplants that we do a year in this country, and for the vast majority of those kids getting hearts, they would have available their old hearts. We could use their valves.
Nick and Tayler Monroe, Owen's parents, learned that he had a serious heart defect called truncus arteriosis when they went for an in-depth ultrasound exam at his 20th week of development. They knew that he would need open-heart surgery very young and then would likely have a handful of surgeries before he was a teenager and then a couple more after that throughout his life. He also had a defective pulmonary heart valve that didn't work well.
When they were told about the new procedure, The parents realized that if everything went well, Owen wouldn't need any more open-heart surgeries. If Owen's heart was repaired using frozen valves harvested from cadavers, which is also an alternate procedure, their son had only a 50% chance of survival.
In February 2022, they received their first jolt of hope when the hospital found a matching heart. The donor's heart muscle wasn't suitable for transplant, but the valves and blood vessels might help Owen. In April 2022, Owen underwent surgery, and around midnight, the procedure was completed, and Owen is now a happy, active toddler meeting his developmental milestones.
Courtesy: CNN
DNA from ancient Europeans, who lived up to 34,000 years ago, provides insight into the origin of multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune neurological disease. The researchers found that genetic variants that now increase MS risk once served to protect people from animal-borne diseases.
They sequenced ancient DNA from 1,664 people from various sites across Western Europe and Asia and compared these genomes with modern DNA from the UK Biobank, comprising about 410,000 self-identified "white-British" people and more than 24,000 others born outside the United Kingdom.
Researchers have been working to make growing heart valves a reality through tissue engineering, germinating them from cells in a lab. That approach had worked in animals, but it had not yet panned out in humans.
The procedure is catching on quickly, with 12 other partial heart transplants performed in children since Owen's surgery, including nine at Duke Health, the hospital that developed the operation. The technique has also enabled "domino transplants" and split-root transplants, which allow a single donor heart to save the lives of two critically ill infants.
In a domino transplant, the first child, born with a weak heart muscle that can't adequately pump blood, gets a whole donated heart while the second baby gets the healthy blood vessels and valves from the first infant. In a split-root transplant, the functioning parts of a heart are donated to two infants.
Dr. Joseph Turek, chief of pediatric heart surgery at Duke Health and the surgeon who created the partial heart transplant, believes that it could help hundreds of children every year in the US. He believes that that, ultimately, it will be limited by the number of donors. There are 500 pediatric heart transplants that we do a year in this country, and for the vast majority of those kids getting hearts, they would have available their old hearts. We could use their valves.
Nick and Tayler Monroe, Owen's parents, learned that he had a serious heart defect called truncus arteriosis when they went for an in-depth ultrasound exam at his 20th week of development. They knew that he would need open-heart surgery very young and then would likely have a handful of surgeries before he was a teenager and then a couple more after that throughout his life. He also had a defective pulmonary heart valve that didn't work well.
When they were told about the new procedure, The parents realized that if everything went well, Owen wouldn't need any more open-heart surgeries. If Owen's heart was repaired using frozen valves harvested from cadavers, which is also an alternate procedure, their son had only a 50% chance of survival.
In February 2022, they received their first jolt of hope when the hospital found a matching heart. The donor's heart muscle wasn't suitable for transplant, but the valves and blood vessels might help Owen. In April 2022, Owen underwent surgery, and around midnight, the procedure was completed, and Owen is now a happy, active toddler meeting his developmental milestones.
Courtesy: CNN
DNA from prehistoric Europeans shows unexpected migration patterns and roots of multiple sclerosis
DNA from ancient Europeans, who lived up to 34,000 years ago, provides insight into the origin of multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune neurological disease. The researchers found that genetic variants that now increase MS risk once served to protect people from animal-borne diseases.
They sequenced ancient DNA from 1,664 people from various sites across Western Europe and Asia and compared these genomes with modern DNA from the UK Biobank, comprising about 410,000 self-identified "white-British" people and more than 24,000 others born outside the United Kingdom.
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One significant discovery related to MS is that a pivotal migration event about 5,000 years ago at the start of the Bronze Age when livestock herders called the ‘Yamnaya’ people moved into Western Europe from an area that includes modern Ukraine and southern Russia. They carried genetic traits that were beneficial at the time, protective against infections that could arise from their sheep and cattle. As sanitary conditions improved over the millennia, these same variants increased MS risk. This helps explain why Northern Europeans have the world's highest MS prevalence, double that of Southern Europeans.
Around 11,000 years ago, farmers from the area of modern Turkey expanded into Western Europe, replacing hunter-gatherers. The Yamnaya later replaced these agriculturalists, who were Europe's first true nomads. High Yamnaya-related ancestry exists in Northern Europeans, peaking in Ireland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden and decreasing further south.
The findings underscore how genetic traits can change from beneficial to deleterious as conditions evolve. Pathogenic infections increased in frequency during the Bronze Age due to close proximity between people and their domestic animals and rising population density. It was not until the modern era, with widespread sanitation and medical care, that these genetic variants became surplus to our immunological requirements, resulting in an increase in the risk of developing MS and other autoimmune diseases.
The research also shed light on other characteristics of Europeans, such as being taller than Southern Europeans, having a heightened genetic risk for Alzheimer's and type 2 diabetes, and discovering lactose tolerance, the ability to digest sugar in milk and other dairy products, emerging in Europe approximately 6,000 years ago.
Courtesy: Reuters
Weird RNA bits named as ‘Obelisks’ discovered in Human mouth and guts
Scientists have discovered tiny bits of RNA, even smaller than viruses, that colonize bacteria inside human guts and mouths. These scraps of genetic material are among the smallest known elements to transfer information that can be read by a cell, and the sequences that they encode are new to science.
Obelisks, as preprint co-author and biochemist Ivan Zheludev at Stanford University in California and his colleagues are calling the newly discovered elements, are flattened circles of RNA that are folded into rod-like structures. They have been seen before, in the form of 'viroids', the structures made of RNA that are similar to viruses but are much smaller. Viroids were first discovered in the 1970s when some were found to cause diseases in plants.
Soon scientists discovered a similar element that can cause hepatitis in humans. A flurry of studies in the past fifty years have reported viroid-like elements in a range of animals and fungi, and a study last year provided the first hint that they might be present in bacteria.
Zheludev and his colleagues took advantage of the characteristic circular RNA of viroids to search for similar elements in databases of RNA from human stool. They found obelisks in almost 10% of samples of gut and oral microbiota collected from 472 individuals, most of them from North America. The study is "a milestone" because it presents the best available evidence that such elements are widespread in the bacterial world, not just in more complex organisms.
Courtesy: The Nature
Physics behind Moths manoeuvre around the light revealed
As the famous couplet from a poem of Dr Iqbal goes “Parvaany ko Chiraag hai, bulbul ko Phool bas, Sidiq Ky liye hai Khuda kaa Rasool bas”.
A number of explanations of why nocturnal insects fly erratically around fires and lamps have included theories of “lunar navigation” and “escape to the light” have been published in the past. However, without three-dimensional flight data to test them rigorously, the cause for this odd behaviour has remained unsolved till date.
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Now a team of Scientists employed high-resolution motion capture in the laboratory and stereo-videography in the field to reconstruct the 3D kinematics of insect flights around artificial lights in real time.
Contrary to the expectation of attraction towards the light, they found that the insects do not steer directly toward the light. Instead, insects turn their dorsum toward the light, generating flight bouts perpendicular to the source.
Under natural sky light during the day, tilting the dorsum towards the brightest visual hemisphere helps maintain proper flight attitude and control. However near artificial sources, however, this highly conserved dorsal-light-response can produce continuous steering around the light which traps an insect in a quagmire.
The guidance model by the Scientists demonstrates that this dorsal tilting is sufficient to create the seemingly erratic flight paths of insects near lights and is the most plausible model for why flying insects gather at artificial lights.
Courtesy: The Nature
Scientists reveal why our Urine is Yellowish in colour
Urine colour can change due to hydration, diet, and medication, but among the average healthy person, it is a shade of yellow. A new study published in Nature Microbiology has uncovered a long-standing mystery: what gives urine its yellow colour?
Researchers have found that an enzyme called bilirubin reductase (BilR) is responsible for giving urine its yellow hue. These results could be used to help study the links between the gut microbiome and health conditions such as jaundice and inflammatory bowel disease.
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As red blood cells degrade, the pigment bilirubin is created as a byproduct. Bilirubin is released in the gut to be excreted, but it can be reabsorbed. If bilirubin builds up in the blood, it can lead to jaundice where the skin and eyes turn yellow.
For more than 125 years, experts have known that compounds in the gut turn bilirubin into the compound urobilin, which is the pigment that results in yellow urine. However, what they didn't know was what enzyme or collection of enzymes turned bilirubin into urobilin.
Advancements in genome sequencing helped discover this key enzyme. The work to find BilR relied on combining experimental screening with genomic analysis, an approach that has only become possible with the isolation of more gut bacterial species and the advancement of genome sequencing technology. This work unravelled a fundamental aspect of how our gut microbiomes influence our daily lives.
Bilirubin reductase will help in terms of future research to understand the breakdown of bilirubin, which is formed by the breakdown of heme present within red blood cells and some other cells within the body. In some disease states, high levels of bilirubin may result in brain damage, which can be sometimes severe and even lead to death.
Researchers discovered that bilirubin reductase is present in nearly all healthy adults but not in newborns and adult individuals with inflammatory bowel disease. Failure of bilirubin breakdown has been clearly associated with jaundice in infants and gallstones in adult patients with inflammatory bowel diseases.
Urine color can indicate a variety of health issues with patients. Yellow or dark yellow urine may indicate that a person is not adequately hydrated, red urine usually indicates blood in the urine, which may be associated with kidney stones, enlarged prostates, urinary infections, bladder cancer, kidney cancer, and some liver dysfunctions.
Courtesy: Healthline
Huge sea curtains proposed to stop Glacial melting
The ocean is rising, with estimates suggesting that sea levels could rise by up to five feet by 2100 and 30 feet by 2300. Glacologists, including British glaciologist John Moore, have proposed a solution to reduce sea level rise and save surfing spots like Pipeline and J-Bay.
Moore and his colleague Michael Wolovick published an article in 2018 proposing a giant underwater sea wall, which would float high enough from the ocean floor to deflect the deep, warm water current. Estimates say it could cost as much as USD $500 million.
The curtain idea was initially proposed as a solution to the precarious state of the Jakobshavn Glacier on the western shores of Greenland. The glacier drains 30-50 billion tons of ice off the ice sheets of Greenland each year, accounting for four percent of the sea level rise experienced in the 20th century. It is also one of the fastest deteriorating glaciers in the world, with the surrounding water increasing about one degree Celsius in temperature since the 1990s.
However, not everyone is ecstatic about the idea of inserting something so large into the ocean. Some experts have their doubts, including how such an object would affect the ecosystem, potential opposition from native Greenlanders, the impact of a diverted ocean current on melting ice sheets, potential damage to the seabed, and whether the curtain would successfully divert the current.
Even Moore acknowledges that it might be too late to implement a curtain at the Jakobshavn Glacier, as the air and water in Greenland are likely already getting too warm. He is already looking towards even larger and consequential glaciers in Antarctica. Wolovick emphasizes that they will not dive into rash decisions without abundant scientific evidence, as it is vital that we are not perceived as recklessly rushing into things too quickly.
Courtesy: The Inertia
KUAST in Saudi Arabia releases largest ever catalogue of ocean DNA
A new study by KAUST and Spanish collaborators has released the Global Ocean Gene Catalogue 1.0, the world's most comprehensive database yet, for understanding microbial distribution and function in the ocean. The catalogue matches microbial class with gene function, geographic location, and habitat type, including 317 million unique gene clusters. Ocean microbes represent the earliest lifeforms on Earth and have evolved the capacity to metabolize compounds that affect the cycles of elements like nitrogen, sulfur, and carbon, which control ocean productivity and affect climate stability. Their beginnings at the bottom of the sea have made them a fascinating study not only for the evolution of life but also for biotechnology.
The use of marine genetic resources in industrial processes yields an estimated $6 billion annually, a number that doubles every six years as more genes in ocean microbes are found. Scientists can access the catalogue remotely to investigate how different ocean ecosystems work, track the impact of pollution and global warming, and search for biotechnology applications such as new antibiotics or ways to break down plastics.
The catalogue reveals major differences in microbial activity in open oceans and ocean floors, as well as discovers a surprising number of fungi contributing to the genomic diversity of the mesopelagic ocean (depths of 200 meters to 1000 meters). It also provides an extraordinary wealth of information on benthic microbes, which live on the seafloor and are far less studied than their open ocean cousins, pelagic microbes.
The ability to collect and analyze this new wealth of ocean data comes from major developments in DNA sequencing technology and computational power. Further projects focused on sampling and massive sequencing of understudied habitats in the ocean, including organisms such as corals and seagrass, will likely reveal many times the number of genes included in this initial gene catalogue.
Courtesy: King Abdullah University, Saudi Arabia
AI and Robotics used to create automated lab that can design Proteins
Protein engineering has nearly limitless applications across chemistry, energy and medicine, but creating new proteins with improved or novel functions remains slow, labor-intensive and inefficient process.
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Scientists have now come up with Self-driving Autonomous Machines for Protein Landscape Exploration, also called SAMPLE. It is a novel platform for fully autonomous protein engineering.
SAMPLE is driven by an Artificial intelligence programme that learns protein sequence & function relationships. It designs new proteins and sends designs to a fully automated robotic system that experimentally tests the designed proteins and provides feedback to improve the AI programmes’ understanding of the system.
The team of researchers deployed four SAMPLE programmes with the goal of engineering glycoside hydrolase enzymes with enhanced thermal tolerance. Despite showing individual differences in their search behaviour, all four programmes quickly converged on thermostable enzymes.
The Self-driving laboratories are the things from the future. They will automate and accelerate the scientific discovery process and hold great potential for the fields of protein engineering and synthetic biology.
Courtesy: The Nature
