A filter made from a common fungus species used to block and degrade toxins
Category: food – Page 2
Microplastics clog liver immune cells, driving fat buildup in mice
Microplastics appear capable of significantly impairing the function of phagocytes in the liver, at least in mice. In turn, this disrupts the metabolism of this vital organ and increases the build-up of fat inside it. These key findings from a joint German-Austrian study led by the University of Bonn, have now been published in the journal Nature Metabolism.
Phagocytes, literally “eating cells,” or “macrophages” to give them their scientific name, are immune cells that reside in virtually every organ of the body. They play an important protective role, looking out for bacteria, diseased cells and foreign matter, engulfing them and breaking them down into their component parts. In addition, they help the organs they live in function properly.
“From working with cell cultures, we’ve known for several years that macrophages also take up microplastics,” explains Professor Elvira Mass from the LIMES Institute at the University of Bonn. “We wanted to know whether that’s also the case in a living organism and, if so, what effect it has.”
Experimental cancer vaccine makes its own oxygen and gives T cells a boost
When it comes to priorities in life, oxygen tops the list. Humans can go weeks without food and days without water. Take away the ability to breathe, however, and the clock starts ticking within minutes as the brain begins shutting down. But the life-giving gas does even more heavy lifting than you might think.
The immune system, which battles cancer with the help of specialized fighters, such as T cells, relies on oxygen to mount its attack.
Now, Bouvé College of Health Sciences professor and director of the pharmaceutical and biomedical sciences graduate program Stephen Hatfield and his colleagues are enlisting oxygen in the cancer fight with a new vaccine designed to give T cells a powerful edge.
3D-printed scaffolds help turn waste methane into useful chemical using less power than liquid reactors
When landfills and wastewater treatment plants create methane as a byproduct, much of it is simply burned and its value is lost. But the gas is an energy-rich resource that could be recycled as a fuel, chemical feedstock or bioproduct. Capturing and converting waste methane offers an opportunity to recover energy and create useful products from an otherwise wasted gas stream.
To harness that resource, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have developed a solid-state bioreactor that can convert methane into succinate, a valuable chemical used to make polymers, stabilize drugs, enhance food flavor and more. The small, efficient bioreactor performs more than 10 times better than conventional liquid-state systems—and it consumes less power.
“Bioproduction using poorly soluble gases has long been limited by slow mass transfer and low efficiency because conventional liquid-phase bioreactors are not well suited for gas fermentation,” said LLNL scientist and corresponding author Fang Qian. “With growing interest in recovering energy and valuable products from waste gas streams, new bioreactor technologies designed specifically for gas fermentation are greatly needed.”
Tiny robot can precisely control its jump height
As our skies increasingly crowd with buzzing, hovering, flitting drones, spare a thought for the humble hopping robot. Hopping, a popular form of locomotion in the insect and amphibian worlds, is nearly two orders of magnitude more energy-efficient than flying. Unlike a mosquito that must constantly expend energy to stay aloft, a flea only works out when it jumps.
Those cost savings could also pay off in the world of robotics: A group of small, simple hopping robots could explore a location much more cheaply than flying drones. These robots could find gas leaks in an oil refinery, monitor water and fertilizer usage on a farm, or even explore other planets.
With this in mind, engineers at the University of Washington have created DirectHop, a roughly 1-gram (0.04-ounce) robot that can perform multiple hops in sequence and jump high enough to clear a standard stair step. The robot uses a tiny electric motor and three folding legs to launch itself to a specified jump height with 1-centimeter (0.4-inch) accuracy. After it lands, DirectHop can twitch to right itself and then prepare for another jump.
Low-cost sensor tracks soil pH continuously for months across varied soils
At first glance, a farm field doesn’t seem all that complicated. It’s just dirt and crops.
But among the landscape lies one of Earth’s most complex ecosystems—a bustling network of microbes, nutrients, roots and chemical reactions that quietly govern the health of every harvest.
For years, understanding what’s happening beneath that surface has been one of agriculture’s biggest challenges. Important soil and plant indicators, like pH, microbial activity and plant physiology, are always changing yet notoriously difficult to track in real time.
Irrigating US Crops Slashes Global Footprint
The study finds that expanding irrigation on cropland could substantially reduce agriculture’s global environmental footprint by increasing yields and reducing the amount of land needed to produce food. [ https://www.labroots.com/trending/earth-and-environmental-sc…ootprint-2](https://www.labroots.com/trending/earth-and-environmental-sc…ootprint-2)
How can land irrigation help curb greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs)? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address as a team of scientists compared the impacts of land irrigation to land conversion and how this impacts GHGs. This study has the potential to help farmers, scientists, and the public better understand the role of land irrigation and land conversion on the environment and the steps that can be taken to improve the impact.
For the study, the researchers analyzed data regarding crop irrigation with the goal of ascertaining how its GHG emissions compare to land conversion methods. The primary motivation behind the study was to fill a longstanding knowledge gap regarding the pros and cons of irrigation compared to its GHG emissions. Land irrigation is the controlled watering of crops while land conversion is the intense process of modifying unfarmable land into farmable land.
In the end, the researchers found that not only does land irrigation improve crop production, but the estimated benefits of GHG emissions reduction from land irrigation compared to GHG emissions production from land irrigation are about 361 times greater. The researchers note the majority of GHG emissions produced from land irrigation come from the energy needed to pump the water, which they note can be even further reduced from using electric pumps instead of fossil fuel pumps.
A finely tuned mess—how disorder can make networks more stable
Perfection is overrated—at least when it comes to complex systems like the power grid, food webs and advanced materials. For decades, scientists generally assumed that networks function most reliably when their individual components are as similar as possible. But real-world networks are rarely uniform.
Generators in a power grid, neurons in a brain, animals in a food web and components in a material all differ in ways that scientists traditionally treated as imperfections.
Now, Northwestern University physicists are overturning that long-held assumption.