Salt marshes trap microplastics in their sediments, creating record of human plastic use

A team led by UC Riverside engineers has developed a catalyst to remove a dangerous chemical from water on Earth that could also make Martian soil safer for agriculture and help produce oxygen for human Mars explorers. Perchlorate, a negative ion consisting of one chlorine atom bonded to four oxygen atoms, occurs naturally in some soils on Earth, and is especially abundant in Martian soil. As a powerful oxidizer, perchlorate is also manufactured and used in solid rocket fuel, fireworks, munitions, airbag initiators for vehicles, matches and signal flares. It is a byproduct in some disinfectants ...

Fukuoka, Japan - The global threat of ongoing climate change has one principal cause: carbon that was buried underground in the form of fossil fuels is being removed and released into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide (CO2). One promising approach to addressing this problem is carbon capture and storage: using technology to take CO2 out of the atmosphere to return it underground. In a new study published in Greenhouse Gases Science and Technology, researchers from Kyushu University and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan, investigated geological storage of low-purity CO2 mixed with nitrogen (N2) and oxygen (O2), produced by direct air capture (DAC) using membrane-based technology. Many current ...

Climate scientists at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU, Singapore) have extended the known record of Singapore's sea-level to almost 10,000 years ago, providing a more robust dataset to aid future predictions of sea-level rise. One of the main challenges in researching climate change is to reconstruct its history over thousands of years. To have a better sense of the potential causes and effects of future changes, scientists need to learn from and understand the past. Extracting ancient sediments from a depth of up to 40 m underground at a site at Singapore's Marina South, an international team led by NTU researchers put the samples through rigorous laboratory ...

Bottom Line: The majority of surveyed Americans had an inadequate understanding of palliative care, and frequency of health care utilization was one determinant of knowledge. Journal in Which the Study was Published: Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research Author: Motolani Ogunsanya, PhD, an assistant professor at The University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center Background: Palliative care aims to improve the quality of life for patients and caretakers by addressing the physical, psychological, and logistical challenges associated with a disease or its treatment. In contrast to hospice, which provides comfort care for patients who have stopped treatment and are near the end of life, palliative care serves as an ...

Oncotarget published "Characterization of the inflammatory microenvironment and hepatic macrophage subsets in experimental hepatocellular carcinoma models" which reported that HCC typically develops on a background of chronic inflammation and fibrosis with tumor associated macrophages playing an important role in chronic inflammation-induced HCC and progression. However, the liver harbors unique macrophages, resident liver Kupffer cells and monocyte-derived macrophages, and their contribution to HCC and to the population of TAMs is incompletely known. Here, the authors characterized the tumor microenvironment and the proportion and transcriptional profile of ...

A growing number of people use they/them pronouns to signal their gender identity, but for many people, use of "they" to refer to a single individual takes some getting used to. Results of a recent END ...

Lauren Dreier was paging through a 19th century book by the German architect Gottfried Semper when she spotted some intriguing patterns inspired by lace. A professional artist and designer who often incorporates technology into her work, Dreier, who is also a doctoral student at the School of Architecture at Princeton University, decided to recreate the printed illustrations in 3D. She grabbed ribbon-like plastic material she had been experimenting with in her studio, bending and connecting the semi-rigid strips. To Dreier's surprise, the structure she built assumed a bumpy geometry, with four distinct hills and valleys. "I thought it would make a dome, but it was this unusual shape," Dreier said. Curious to know what caused ...

A new study from the University of Chicago and Scripps Research Institute shows that during the last great pandemic--2009's H1N1 influenza pandemic--people developed strong, effective immune responses to stable, conserved parts of the virus. This suggests a strategy for developing universal flu vaccines that are designed to generate those same responses, instead of targeting parts of the virus that tend to evolve rapidly and require a new vaccine every year. Influenza is an elusive and frustrating target for vaccines. There are two main types of flu virus that can infect humans, which evolve rapidly from season to season. ...

Neurological and psychiatric symptoms such as fatigue and depression are common among people with Covid-19 and may be just as likely in people with mild cases, according to a new review study led by a UCL researcher. By reviewing evidence from 215 studies of Covid-19, the meta-analysis published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry reports a wide range of ways that Covid-19 can affect mental health and the brain. Lead author Dr Jonathan Rogers (UCL Psychiatry and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust) said: "We had expected that neurological and psychiatric symptoms would be ...

Researchers have re-animated specimens of a fungus that causes coffee wilt to discover how the disease evolved and how its spread can be prevented. Coffee Wilt Disease is caused by a fungus that has led to devastating outbreaks since the 1920s in sub-Saharan Africa, and currently affects two of Africa's most popular coffee varieties: Arabica and Robusta. The new research shows that the fungus likely boosted its ability to infect coffee plants by acquiring genes from a closely related fungus, which causes wilt disease on a wide range of crops, including ...