International Research Awards on New Science Inventions

Trees, crops and even organic waste can be transformed into a bewildering array of plastics to use in products ranging from single-use bags to heavy-duty aeroplane wings. These so-called biopolymers could play a vital role in weaning us off petroleum plastics – which will help cut greenhouse gas emissions, and ensure plastics come from a renewable resource. And in some cases they could help to reduce plastic pollution. One of the major sources of plastic pollution is packaging, which accounted for  nearly 40%  of the plastic used in the EU in 2019, according to Plastics Europe, a trade association. Researchers have developed ways to make biodegradable food waste bags and food packaging from municipal food and garden waste. ‘You are transforming organic waste to make a waste bag, which is biodegradable. So you are closing the cycle – you don’t use other materials to make the (plastic) bag,’ said Thomas Dietrich, an engineer in biotechnology at Spain’s TECNALIA, a ...

Since the onset of the CRISPR genetic editing revolution, scientists have been working to leverage the technology in the development of gene drives that target pathogen-spreading mosquitoes such as  Anopheles  and  Aedes  species, which spread malaria, dengue and other life-threatening diseases. Much less genetic engineering has been devoted to  Culex  genus mosquitoes, which spread devastating afflictions stemming from West Nile virus—the leading cause of mosquito-borne disease in the continental United States—as well as other viruses such as the Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) and the pathogen causing avian malaria, a threat to Hawaiian birds. University of California San Diego scientists have now developed several genetic editing tools that help pave the way to an eventual gene drive designed to stop  Culex  mosquitoes from spreading disease. Gene drives are designed to spread modified genes, in this case those that disable the a...

If you’ve watched a slasher movie, you’ve probably been exposed to the final girl trope – a closing scene of a white, suburban teenage girl who triumphed over a threatening monster and lived to tell the tale. But her story doesn’t stop there – in some ways, a whole new life, overshadowed by trauma, has only just begun, Ohio State University graduate student  Morgan Podraza  posits in an article published in the journal  Horror Studies . Consider actor Jamie Lee Curtis’ depiction of Laurie Strode in the  Halloween  film released in 2018, 40 years after her friends were murdered by Michael Myers on Halloween night. In that original film, she survived his attacks by wielding a knitting needle, a coat hanger and a knife that he dropped. The grownup Strode lives an isolated life in a fortress in the woods, always on the lookout for the looming threat of Myers’ return. Earlier in her adult life, viewers learn, her paranoia had rendered her an unfit mother in the...

If you plan to cut sugar out of your diet, will you? Economic models make predictions about when people will or will not take certain actions, and when procrastination and temptation will get the better of us. Generally, the models state that your actions are consistent with your plans; if you plan to reduce sugar for the next month, you will. New Caltech professor of economics  Charlie Sprenger  is poking holes in these models. He designs experiments to test how people behave when faced with various decisions, ranging from food choices to the implementation of vaccination programs and more. His experiments have shown that the standard economic models of behavior are not consistent with how people act in real-life settings, and these findings suggest the need for new public policy strategies. For instance, what are the best ways to encourage people to make healthy food choices for themselves? Sprenger says he did not start out wanting to be an economics professor. He ha...

A new study published in Nature Communications demonstrates that a consortium of bacteria designed to complement missing or underrepresented functions in the imbalanced microbiome of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients, prevented and treated chronic immune-mediated colitis in humanized mouse models. The study’s senior author, Balfour Sartor , MD, Midget Distinguished Professor of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology, Co-Director of the UNC Multidisciplinary IBD Center, said the results are encouraging for future use treating Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis patients. “The idea with this treatment is to restore the normal function of the protective bacteria in the gut, targeting the source of IBD, instead of treating its symptoms with traditional immunosuppressants that can cause side effects like infections or tumors,” Sartor said. The live bacteria consortia, called GUT-103 and GUT-108, were developed by biotech firm Gusto Global . GUT-103 is comprised of 17 strains o...

A Cornell University-developed technology provides beekeepers, consumers and farmers with an antidote for deadly pesticides, which kill wild bees and cause beekeepers to lose around a third of their hives every year on average. An early version of the technology ¬- which detoxified a widely-used group of insecticides called organophosphates – is described in a new study, “Pollen-Inspired Enzymatic Microparticles to Reduce Organophosphate Toxicity in Managed Pollinators,” published in Nature Food . The antidote delivery method has now been adapted to effectively protect bees from all insecticides, and has inspired a new company, Beemmunity, based in New York state. Studies show that wax and pollen in 98% of hives in the U.S. are contaminated with an average of six pesticides, which also lower a bee’s immunity to devastating varroa mites and pathogens. At the same time, pollinators provide vital services by helping to fertilize crops that lead to production of a third of the food we c...

Waking up just one hour earlier could reduce a person’s risk of major depression by 23%, suggests a sweeping new genetic study published May 26 in the journal JAMA Psychiatry . The study of 840,000 people, by researchers at University of Colorado Boulder and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, represents some of the strongest evidence yet that chronotype–a person’s propensity to sleep at a certain time –influences depression risk. It’s also among the first studies to quantify just how much, or little, change is required to influence mental health. As people emerge, post-pandemic, from working and attending school remotely– a trend that has led many to shift to a later sleep schedule–the findings could have important implications. “We have known for some time that there is a relationship between sleep timing and mood, but a question we often hear from clinicians is: How much earlier do we need to shift people to see a benefit?” said senior author Celine Vetter, assistant profes...

One-fifth of babies who inherit a genetic variant located on chromosome 16 will develop autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by age 3. The variant is called 16p11.2 deletion. Noboru Hiroi, PhD , of The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (also referred to as UT Health San Antonio), is studying mice that have this deletion. The team, which includes colleagues from Japan, Ireland and the U.S., is harnessing the power of machine learning to understand which vocalizations of the newborn mouse pups are most predictive of social abnormalities one month later when the pups reach puberty. “It is essential to identify those very early signs that can predict what is to come, because if we can translate what we discover in mouse pups to human infants and apply therapeutic options earlier, their outcome will be better,” Dr. Hiroi said. Mice are studied because of the short timeline of their development. The same research in human babies, which is just beginning, will take two to...

Nobody likes driving in a blizzard, including autonomous vehicles. To make self-driving cars safer on snowy roads, engineers look at the problem from the car’s point of view. A major challenge for fully autonomous vehicles is navigating bad weather. Snow especially confounds crucial sensor data that helps a vehicle gauge depth, find obstacles and keep on the correct side of the yellow line, assuming it is visible. Averaging more than 200 inches of snow every winter, Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula is the perfect place to push autonomous vehicle tech to its limits. In two papers presented at SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing 2021, researchers from Michigan Technological University discuss solutions for snowy driving scenarios that could help bring self-driving options to snowy cities like Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis and Toronto. Just like the weather at times, autonomy is not a sunny or snowy yes-no designation. Autonomous vehicles cover a spectrum of levels, from cars already on the...

Rafts of golden brown drift across the sea, leafy suburbs providing food, refuge, life, for the flotsam of fish that bathe between your branches. Filefish, triggerfish, crabs, and shrimp flock to your nest, caught up in pelagic mats that bloom like woolly roses caught in wells. Gorging on the runoff of our inseminated waste you swell to obscene proportions. Your bloated corpse a toxic wilderness, its brackish boundlessness a memento mor i for the thoughtlessness of our excess. Sargassum in the Florida Keys (Image Credit: Brian Lapointe, Florida Atlantic University). This poem is inspired by recent research , which has found that excess nitrogen has made sargassum the world’s largest harmful algal bloom. Sargassum is a genus of large brown seaweed (a type of algae) that floats in island-like masses and never attaches to the seafloor. Typically, sargassum blooms exist in low-nutrient waters off the coast of the North Atlantic, where they provide a vital nursery...

A new fungus strain could provide a chemical-free method for eradicating mites that kill honey bees, according to a study published this month in Scientific Reports . A team led by Washington State University entomologists bred a strain of Metarhizium, a common fungus found in soils around the world, to work as a control agent against varroa mites. Unlike other strains of Metarhizium, the one created by the WSU research team can survive in the warm environments common in honey bee hives, which typically have a temperature of around 35 Celsius (or 95 F). “We’ve known that metarhizium could kill mites, but it was expensive and didn’t last long because the fungi died in the hive heat,” said Steve Sheppard, professor in WSU’s Department of Entomology and corresponding author on the paper. “Our team used directed evolution to develop a strain that survives at the higher temperatures. Plus, Jennifer took fungal spores from dead mites, selecting for virulence against varroa.” Jennifer Han...

If a ban were introduced on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars, and they were replaced by electric cars, the result would be a great reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. That is the finding of new research from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, looking at emissions from the entire life cycle – from manufacture of electric cars and batteries, to electricity used for operation. However, the total effect of a phasing out of fossil-fuelled cars will not be felt until the middle of the century – and how the batteries are manufactured will affect the extent of the benefit. A rapid and mandatory phasing in of electric cars could cause emissions from Swedish passenger cars’ exhausts to approach zero by 2045. The Swedish government has proposed an outright ban on the sale of new fossil fuel cars from the year 2030 – but that alone will not be enough to achieve Sweden’s climate targets on schedule. “The lifespan of the cars currently on the roads and those which would be sold b...

A massive genome-wide association study (GWAS) of genetic and health records of 1.2 million people from four separate data banks has identified 178 gene variants linked to major depression, a disorder that will affect one of every five people during their lifetimes. The results of the study, led by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (V.A.) researchers at Yale University School of Medicine and University of California-San Diego (UCSD), may one day help identify people most at risk of depression and related psychiatric disorders and help doctors prescribe drugs best suited to treat the disorder. The study was published May 27 in the journal  Nature Neuroscience . For the study, the research team analyzed medical records and genomes collected from more than 300,000 participants in the V.A.’s Million Veteran Program (MVP), one of the largest and most diverse databanks of genetic and medical information in the world. These new data were combined in a meta-analysis with genetic...

Adults who have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) were more than three times as likely to have an  ischemic stroke  later in life compared to adults who do not have OCD, according to new research published today in  Stroke , a journal of the American Stroke Association, a division of the American Heart Association. “The results of our study should encourage people with OCD to maintain a healthy lifestyle, such as  quitting  or not smoking, getting regular  physical activity  and managing a healthy  weight  to avoid stroke-related risk factors,” said study senior author Ya-Mei Bai, M.D., Ph.D., a professor in the department of psychiatry at Taipei Veterans General Hospital and National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University College of Medicine, both in Taiwan. Worldwide, stroke is the second-leading cause of death after heart disease. Stroke is a medical emergency that occurs when blood and oxygen flow to the brain are interrupted, usually by a ...

Researchers have developed a new technique that allows microscopic fluorescence imaging at four times the depth limit imposed by light diffusion. Fluorescence microscopy is often used to image molecular and cellular details of the brain in animal models of various diseases but, until now, has been limited to small volumes and highly invasive procedures due to intense light scattering by the skin and skull. “Visualization of biological dynamics in an unperturbed environment, deep in a living organism, is essential for understanding the complex biology of living organisms and progression of diseases,” said research team leader Daniel Razansky from the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, both in Switzerland. “Our study represents the first time that 3D fluorescence microscopy has been performed fully noninvasively at capillary level resolution in an adult mouse brain, effectively covering a field of view of about 1 centimeter.” In  Optica , The Optical Society’s (OSA) journal for ...

To help patients manage their mental wellness between appointments, researchers at Texas A&M University have developed a smart device-based electronic platform that can continuously monitor the state of hyperarousal, one of the key signs of psychiatric distress. They said this advanced technology could read facial cues, analyze voice patterns and integrate readings from built-in vital signs sensors on smartwatches to determine if a patient is under stress. Furthermore, the researchers noted that the technology could provide feedback and alert care teams if there is an abrupt deterioration in the patient’s mental health. “Mental health can change very rapidly, and a lot of these changes remain hidden from providers or counselors,” said Dr. Farzan Sasangohar, assistant professor in the Wm Michael Barnes ’64 Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. “Our technology will give providers and counselors continuous access to patient variables and patient status, and I think i...