International Research Awards on New Science Inventions

Mantis shrimp don’t need baby food. They start their life as ferocious predators who know how to throw a lethal punch. A new study appearing April 29 in the Journal of Experimental Biology shows that larvae of the Philippine mantis shrimp (Gonodactylaceus falcatus) already display the ultra-fast movements for which these animals are known, even when they are smaller than a short grain of rice. Their ultra-fast punching appendages measure less than 1 mm, and develop right when the larva exhausts its yolk reserves, moves away from its nest and out into the big wide sea. It immediately begins preying on organisms smaller than a grain of sand. Although they accelerate their arms almost 100 times faster than a Formula One car, Philippine mantis shrimp larvae are slower than larger adults, which goes against the theoretical expectation that smaller is always faster. “They’re producing amazing speeds and impressive accelerations relative to their body size, but they’re not as fast as adu...

Sluggishly you sweep across the sea, ceaselessly stimulating your supposed sessility as you secrete spiky streams through dense, porous skeletons. Interwoven spicules that suggest clandestine movements, swaying in the currents deep deep beneath the surface. A hidden sanctuary of shifting shapes that stray from sight; strategies of survival below submerged peaks and shattered sentiments. Trails left by sponges as they crawl across the seafloor (Image Credit: AWI OFOBS team, PS101). This poem is inspired by research , which has found that sponges leave trails on the sea floor in the Arctic deep sea. A sponge is a simple animal with many cells, but no mouth, muscles, heart, or brain. The basic body plan of a sponge is a jelly-like layer sandwiched between two thin layers of cells, and there are over 10,000 species of sponge, most of which live in the ocean and feed on bacteria and other microorganisms, although a few of them also eat tiny crustaceans. Adult marine sp...

About a quarter of a percent of the entire gross domestic product of industrialized countries is estimated to be lost through a single technical issue: the fouling of heat exchanger surfaces by salts and other dissolved minerals. This fouling lowers the efficiency of multiple industrial processes and often requires expensive countermeasures such as water pretreatment. Now, findings from MIT could lead to a new way of reducing such fouling, and potentially even enable turning that deleterious process into a productive one that can yield saleable products. The findings are the result of years of work by recent MIT graduates Samantha McBride PhD ’20 and Henri-Louis Girard PhD ’20 with professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi. The work, reported today in the journal  Science Advances , shows that due to a combination of hydrophobic (water repelling) surfaces and heat, dissolved salts can crystallize in a way that makes it easy to remove them from the surface, in some cas...

A UCLA-led study shows that physicians frequently order preventive medical services for adult Medicare beneficiaries that are considered unnecessary and of “low value” by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — at a cost of $478 million per year. The researchers analyzed national survey data over a 10-year period, looking specifically at seven preventive services given a “D” rating by the task force, and discovered that these services were ordered more than 31 million times annually. BACKGROUND The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel appointed by the Department of Health and Human Services, makes recommendations on the value of clinical preventive services. Services rated D are considered to have no likely health benefit to specific patients and may even be harmful to them. Overall, the utilization of a variety of services considered unnecessary by the task force drives up health care spending by billions of dollars each year. METHOD The researchers examin...

As anyone who has ever tried to clean a home knows, ridding yourself of dust is a Sisyphean effort. No surface stays free of it for long. It turns out that space is somewhat similar. Space is filled with interplanetary dust, which the Earth constantly collects as it plods around the sun – in orbit, in the atmosphere, and if it’s large enough, on the ground as micrometeorites. While specimens may not be large, it turns out such dust particles are reforming scientists’ conception of asteroids and comets and are enough to reconstruct entire scenes in the history of the solar system. Asteroids and comets are primitive bodies left over from early in solar system formation, so the more we can know about their composition, the more we know about where they formed. Those asteroids that formed in the same neighbourhood as comets tend to be closer in composition to them. Trying to break down the asteroid-comet continuum and categorise how similar asteroids could be to comets is ...

Processed diets, which are low in fiber, may initially reduce the incidence of foodborne infectious diseases such as  E. coli  infections, but might also increase the incidence of diseases characterized by low-grade chronic infection and inflammation such as diabetes, according to researchers in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University. This study used mice to investigate how changing from a grain-based diet to a highly processed, high-fat Western style diet impacts infection with the pathogen  Citrobacter rodentium,  which resembles  Escherichia coli   (E. coli)  infections in humans. The findings are published in the journal  PLOS Pathogens . Gut microbiota, the microorganisms living in the intestine, provide a number of benefits, such as protecting a host from infection by bacterial pathogens. These microorganisms are influenced by a variety of environmental factors, especially diet, and rely heavily on complex carbo...

New space research at the University of Leicester is set to use remote sensing techniques to survey the habitats of endangered chimpanzees in the Republic of the Congo. Leicester researchers have signed a memorandum of understanding with the  Jane Goodall Institute (JGI)  and secured Research England funding to explore how remote sensing data, combined with machine learning approaches, can help to map, characterise and develop further understanding about the habitats of chimpanzees in the Tchimpounga Nature Reserve. The collaboration seeks to advance a number of projects that will provide critical scientific insights about the forest and woodlands of Tchimpounga, in the Congo Basin, which is the home of the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Center managed by JGI in collaboration with the Republic of Congo’s Ministry of Waters and Forests. Chimpanzees are listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List as an endangered species. The Jane Goo...

In the continuing search for dark matter in our universe, scientists believe they have found a unique and powerful detector: exoplanets. In a new paper, two astrophysicists suggest dark matter could be detected by measuring the effect it has on the temperature of exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system. This could provide new insights into dark matter, the mysterious substance that can’t be directly observed, but which makes up roughly 80% of the mass of the universe. “We believe there should be about 300 billion exoplanets that are waiting to be discovered,” said  Juri Smirnov , a fellow at The Ohio State University’s  Center for Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics . “Even finding and studying a small number of them could give us a great deal of information about dark matter that we don’t know now.” Smirnov co-authored the paper with Rebecca Leane, a postdoctoral researcher at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University. It was publi...

Tiny molecules called nanobodies, which can be designed to mimic antibody structures and functions, may be the key to blocking a tick-borne bacterial infection that remains out of reach of almost all antibiotics, new research suggests. The infection is called  human monocytic ehrlichiosis , and is one of the most prevalent and potentially life-threatening tick-borne diseases in the United States. The disease initially causes flu-like symptoms common to many illnesses, and in rare cases can be fatal if left untreated. Most antibiotics can’t build up in high enough concentrations to kill the infection-causing bacteria,  Ehrlichia chaffeensis , because the microbes live in and multiply inside human immune cells. Commonly known bacterial pathogens like  Streptococcus  and  E. coli  do their infectious damage outside of hosts’ cells. Ohio State University researchers created nanobodies intended to target a protein that makes  E. chaffeensis  bact...

A new treatment is among the first known to reduce the severity of acute respiratory distress syndrome caused by the flu in animals, according to a new study. Tests in mice infected with high doses of influenza showed that the treatment could improve lung function in very sick mice and prevent progression of disease in mice that were pre-emptively treated after being exposed to the flu. The hope is that it may also help humans infected with the flu, and potentially other causes of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) such as SARS-CoV-2 infection. Specific cells in mice are less able to make key molecules after influenza invades the lungs, reducing their ability to produce a substance called surfactant that enables lungs to expand and contract. The shortage of surfactant is linked to ARDS, an illness so serious that it typically requires mechanical ventilation in an ICU. Researchers bypassed the blocked process in mice by re-introducing the missing molecules alone or in com...

Every year, more than 795,000 people in the United States have a stroke. Of these, approximately 80% lose arm function and as many as 50-60% of this population still experience problems six months later. Traditionally, stroke patients try to regain motor function through physical rehabilitation, where patients re-learn pre-stroke skills, such as eating motions and grasping. However, most patients eventually plateau and stop improving over time. Now, results of a  clinical trial  published in  The Lancet  gives patients new hope in their recovery. Patients who received a novel treatment that combines vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) and rehabilitation showed improvement in upper body motor impairment compared to those who received sham (inactive form of) stimulation and rehabilitation. Considered a natural antenna to the brain, the vagus nerve runs from the chest and abdomen to the brainstem and regulates many of the body’s functions. “This...

In October of 2020, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their discovery of an adaptable, easy way to edit genomes, known as CRISPR, which has transformed the world of genetic engineering. CRISPR has been used to fight lung cancer and correct the mutation responsible for sickle cell anemia in stem cells. But the technology was also used by a Chinese scientist to secretly and illegally edit the genomes of twin girls — the first-ever heritable mutation of the human germline made with genetic engineering. “We’ve moved away from an era of science where we understood the risks that came with new technology and where decision stakes were fairly low,” says Dietram Scheufele, a professor of life sciences communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Today, Scheufele and his colleagues say, we’re in a world where new technologies have very immediate and sometimes unpredictable but significant impacts on society. In a paper publishe...

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, life was plenty busy for Jason Trujillo and his family. He and his wife, Sherrie Jong, had two children, ages 4 and 1. Jong — a civil engineer — was the family’s breadwinner as Trujillo completed his first year at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. As the couple raised their family and juggled work and school, Jong’s parents, Engie and Monty, were getting older; 82-year-old Monty especially struggled to see and hear. When they found out Monty had Alzheimer’s disease, the family knew he needed someone to care for him. That job fell to Trujillo. At first, he resented the stressful and unexpected role. But his mother helped him put things in perspective. “She said, ‘I didn’t raise you to leave an old man that needs help. Take care of this,’” he recalls. “She was 100% right.” Trujillo paused law school and became his father-in-law’s main caregiver, making sure Monty saw his doctors, got his medication and stayed connected to the family. When his cond...

I recently wrote an April Fool piece about an imaginary drug company that invested a billion dollars in a COVID vaccine, but when they ran it through Phase 3 clinical trials it fell just short of statistical significance for effectiveness. “Shucks! Back to the drawing board.” They report the results exactly as the occurred and abandon the vaccine. The joke, of course, is that no drug company behaves in this way. From our vantage out here in consumerland, all vaccine trials are successful. Can you call it “science” if there is only one acceptable outcome of the experiment? Banks that are “too big to fail” cost the public hundreds of billions of dollars. Drugs that are “too big to fail” can cost hundreds of thousands of lives.  How did we get to this place, where medical companies vie with tobacco companies for the least trusted industry in America? where, nevertheless, the companies that have a ginormous conflict of interest end up with the responsibility for safety-testing their...