International Research Awards on New Science Inventions

The Australian wildfires in 2019 and 2020 were historic for how far and fast they spread, and for how long and powerfully they burned. All told, the devastating “Black Summer” fires blazed across more than 43 million acres of land, and extinguished or displaced nearly 3 billion animals. The fires also injected over 1 million tons of smoke particles into the atmosphere, reaching up to 35 kilometers above Earth’s surface — a mass and reach comparable to that of an erupting volcano. Now, atmospheric chemists at MIT have found that the smoke from those fires set off chemical reactions in the stratosphere that contributed to the destruction of ozone, which shields the Earth from incoming ultraviolet radiation. The team’s study, appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , is the first to establish a chemical link between wildfire smoke and ozone depletion. In March 2020, shortly after the fires subsided, the team observed a sharp drop in nitrogen dioxid...

When a space rock survives the turbulent passage through Earth’s atmosphere and strikes the surface, it generates shockwaves that can compress and transform minerals in the planet’s crust. Since these changes depend on the pressure produced upon impact, experts can use features in Earth’s minerals to learn about the meteorite’s life story, from the moment of collision all the way back to the conditions from which the celestial bodies originate. “If you compare an average mineral to one that’s been involved in a meteoritic impact, you’ll find some unique features in the shocked one,” says Arianna Gleason, a scientist at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. “On the outside, they retain some of their original crystalline form, but inside they become disordered and full of beautiful interlocking linear formations called lamellae.” Plagioclase, the most abundant mineral in the Earth’s crust, is one of the most commonly used minerals for painting a fuller pict...

The most successful computer ever to come out of the UK celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. Which is a more brutal environment – a large factory or a child’s bedroom? And what does one have to do with the other? When Eben Upton, co-founder of  Raspberry Pi  and a University of Cambridge alumnus, was thinking about what he wanted an ultra-low-cost computer to be, one of the key requirements was that it be durable: able to withstand being tossed into a backpack hundreds of times. Now, more than a decade later, a computer that was designed in part to withstand the rough and tumble of childhood has found a home in tens of thousands of industrial applications throughout the world, representing around 40% of its annual sales. Raspberry Pi has created a whole new class of computing device, transforming the way engineers design control systems in industry, and has become a standard component of intelligent interfacing. Its adaptability, stability and low price make it...

A molecule that skin tissue produces after injury appears to accelerate hair growth, suggesting a potential new target to reverse hair loss, researchers at Duke University School of Medicine report. In a study appearing online Feb. 24 in the journal Stem Cell Reports, the researchers describe a unique role for a molecule called thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP). They found TSLP plays a key role in prompting hair growth after an injury and during the normal hair growth cycle. “Skin repair after injury is a highly complex process,” said lead author Jessica L. Shannon, a graduate student in the departments of  Dermatology  and  Immunology  at Duke University School of Medicine. “TSLP does not show up immediately after injury, but appears about four days into the healing process. Previous studies described how TSLP triggers immune responses involved in tissue repair, so we initially questioned whether TSLP can speed up wound healing.” Surprisingly, Shannon said, t...

Several FDA-approved drugs — including for type 2 diabetes, hepatitis C and HIV — significantly reduce the ability of the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 to replicate in human cells, according to new research led by scientists at Penn State. Specifically, the team found that these drugs inhibit certain viral enzymes, called proteases, that are essential for SARS-CoV-2 replication in infected human cells. “The SARS-CoV-2 vaccines target the spike protein, but this protein is under strong selection pressure and, as we have seen with Omicron, can undergo significant mutations,” said Joyce Jose, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, Penn State. “There remains an urgent need for SARS-CoV-2 therapeutic agents that target parts of the virus other than the spike protein that are not as likely to evolve.” Previous research has demonstrated that two SARS-CoV-2 enzymes — proteases including Mpro and PLpro — are promising targets for antiviral drug development. Pfizer’s COVID-...

Unvaccinated students had eight times the incidence of COVID-19 infection compared to vaccinated students in a North Carolina independent school, according to a  study  by the ABC Science Collaborative appearing online Feb. 22 in the journal  Pediatrics . Researchers analyzed COVID-19 data from more than 1,100 students in grades 6-12 from Aug. 1-Nov. 12, 2021. During the study period, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention classified COVID-19 county transmission as high, and the Delta variant comprised more than 99% of infections in the region. School policy required universal masking indoors after Aug. 9, 2021. The school’s ventilation system used upgraded air filters but did not install high efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters. Physical distancing was minimal, and there was no routine surveillance testing of students or staff. As of November 2021, the school reported 829 (73.5%) students in grades 6-12 were vaccinated and 299 (26.5%) were unvaccinated...

Caught in an epic cosmic waltz, two supermassive black holes appear to be orbiting around each other every two years. A team of researchers has discovered the pair of supermassive black holes caught in the act of merging 13 billion light-years away.   The two massive bodies are each hundreds of millions of times the mass of our sun and span a distance roughly fifty times the size of our own solar system. When the pair merge in roughly 10,000 years, the collision is expected to shake space and time itself, sending gravitational waves across the universe. The study, which uses University of Michigan data collected at the now-closed U-M Radio Astronomy Observatory at the Peach Mountain Observatory, was led by a team of astronomers at Caltech and includes U-M astronomer and research scientist  Margo Aller . The researchers discovered evidence for this scenario within a fiercely energetic object known as a quasar. Quasars are active cores of galaxies in which a supermassive ...

Seniors take note, running or brisk walking is not the only way to reduce the risk of heart disease. Simply being “up and about” performing routine activities, referred to as daily life movement, including housework, gardening, cooking and self-care activities like showering can significantly benefit cardiovascular health. Compared to women with less than two hours per day of daily life movement, those women with at least four hours of daily life movement had a 43% lower risk of cardiovascular disease, 43% lower risk of coronary heart disease, 30% lower risk of stroke and notably, a 62% lower risk of cardiovascular disease death. Reporting in the  Feb. 22, 2022 online edition  of the Journal of the American Heart Association, a multi-institutional team led by researchers at the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science at University of California San Diego studied the impact of daily life movement to cardiovascular disease risk. “The study demon...

All aboard! Europe’s ferry industry has set sail for an emissions-free future. It’s leading the eco-friendly revolution with electric and hydrogen-powered boats that are destined to make urban transport more sustainable. In just a few months’ time, passengers in Stavanger, Norway, will be able to begin commuting on a revolutionary ferry that doesn’t produce any greenhouse gas emissions. Called Medstraum, which means both “to go with the flow” and “with electricity” in Norwegian, it will be the first high-speed vessel in the world that runs purely on electric power, replacing a diesel-powered ferry that currently shuttles people to surrounding islands. If the trial goes well, similar vessels could soon operate in other cities too. ‘We’re in a very exciting period,’ said Mikal Dahle, a project manager at public transport company Kolumbus AS in Stavanger, Norway, and coordinator of the  TrAM project  which is developing the catamaran ferry. ‘We are now finalising the ve...

Identifying a malfunction in the nation’s power grid can be like trying to find a needle in an enormous haystack. Hundreds of thousands of interrelated sensors spread across the U.S. capture data on electric current, voltage, and other critical information in real time, often taking multiple recordings per second. Researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab have devised a computationally efficient method that can automatically pinpoint anomalies in those data streams in real time. They demonstrated that their artificial intelligence method, which learns to model the interconnectedness of the power grid, is much better at detecting these glitches than some other popular techniques. Because the machine-learning model they developed does not require annotated data on power grid anomalies for training, it would be easier to apply in real-world situations where high-quality, labeled datasets are often hard to come by. The model is also flexible and can be applied to other situations wher...

An electrochemical reaction that splits apart water molecules to produce oxygen is at the heart of multiple approaches aiming to produce alternative fuels for transportation. But this reaction has to be facilitated by a catalyst material, and today’s versions require the use of rare and expensive elements such as iridium, limiting the potential of such fuel production. Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed an entirely new type of catalyst material, called a metal hydroxide-organic framework (MHOF), which is made of inexpensive and abundant components. The family of materials allows engineers to precisely tune the catalyst’s structure and composition to the needs of a particular chemical process, and it can then match or exceed the performance of conventional, more expensive catalysts. The findings are described today in the journal Nature Materials , in a paper by MIT postdoc Shuai Yuan, graduate student Jiayu Peng, Professor Yang Shao-Horn, Professor Yuriy Román-L...

Scintillators are materials that emit light when bombarded with high-energy particles or X-rays. In medical or dental X-ray systems, they convert incoming X-ray radiation into visible light that can then be captured using film or photosensors. They’re also used for night-vision systems and for research, such as in particle detectors or electron microscopes. Researchers at MIT have now shown how one could improve the efficiency of scintillators by at least tenfold, and perhaps even a hundredfold, by changing the material’s surface to create certain nanoscale configurations, such as arrays of wave-like ridges. While past attempts to develop more efficient scintillators have focused on finding new materials, the new approach could in principle work with any of the existing materials. Though it will require more time and effort to integrate their scintillators into existing X-ray machines, the team believes that this method might lead to improvements in medical diagnostic X-rays or C...

Chemists at MIT have developed a novel way to synthesize himastatin, a natural compound that has shown potential as an antibiotic. Using their new synthesis, the researchers were able not only to produce himastatin but also to generate variants of the molecule, some of which also showed antimicrobial activity. They also discovered that the compound appears to kill bacteria by disrupting their cell membranes. The researchers now hope to design other molecules that could have even stronger antibiotic activity. “What we want to do right now is learn the molecular details about how it works, so we can design structural motifs that could better support that mechanism of action. A lot of our effort right now is to learn more about the physicochemical properties of this molecule and how it interacts with the membrane,” says Mohammad Movassaghi, an MIT professor of chemistry and one of the senior authors of the study. Brad Pentelute, an MIT professor of chemistry, is also a senior autho...