Category: Science

Anyone who’s ever done a belly flop into a swimming pool knows it ends with a blunt-sounding splat, a big splash, and a searing red sting. Now researchers know why.

Daniel Harris says the physics behind the phenomenon aren’t too complex. What happens—and what makes it so painful, he explains—is that the forces from the water surface put up a fierce resistance to the body suddenly going from air to water, which is often still.

“All of a sudden, the water has to accelerate to catch up to the speed of what’s falling through the air,” says Harris, assistant professor in the School of Engineering at Brown University who studies fluid mechanics. “When this happens, that large reaction force is sent back to whatever’s doing the impacting, leading to that signature slam.”

How and why this happens in fluid mechanics isn’t just important for developing a prize-winning belly flop for competitions, or dolling out pool-party trivia on why belly flops hurt so much.

The understanding is critical to naval and marine engineering, which often have structures that need to survive high-impact air-to-water slamming forces. For that reason, the phenomenon has been studied thoroughly for the past century.

As reported in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, the researchers set up a belly flop-like water experiment using a blunt cylinder but adding an important vibrating twist to it, which ultimately led them to counterintuitive findings.

“Most of the work that’s been done in this space looks at rigid bodies slamming into the water, whose overall shape doesn’t really change or move in response to the impact,” Harris says. “The questions that we start to get at are: ‘What if the object that’s impacting is flexible so that once it feels the force it can either change shape or deform? How does that change the physics and then, more importantly, the forces that are felt on these structures?”

To answer that, the researchers attached a soft “nose” to the body of their cylinder, referred to as an impactor, with a system of flexible springs.

Graduate student and coauthor John Antolik explains the idea is that the springs—which act in principle similar to the suspension of a car—should help soften the impact by distributing the impact load over a longer period.

This strategy has been floated as a potential solution for reducing sometimes catastrophic slamming impacts in air-to-water transitions, but few experiments have ever looked closely at the fundamental mechanics and physics involved.

For this experiment, the researchers dropped the cylinder repeatedly into still water and analyzed both the visual results and data from sensors embedded inside the cylinder.

This is where the unexpected happened.

The results show that while the strategy can be effective, surprisingly, it doesn’t always soften the impact. In fact, contrary to conventional thinking, sometimes the more flexible system can increase the maximum impact force on the body as compared to a fully rigid structure.

This forced the researchers to dig deeper. Through extensive experiments and by developing a theoretical model, they found their answer. Depending on the height from which the impactor is dropped and how stiff the springs are, the body will not only feel the impact from the slam but it will also feel the vibrations of the structure as it enters the water, compounding the slamming force.

“The structure is vibrating back and forth due to the violent impact, so we were getting readings from both the impact of hitting the fluid and an oscillation because the structure is shaking itself,” Harris says. “If you don’t time those right, you can basically make the situation worse.”

The researchers found the key was the springs: they have to be soft enough to gently absorb the impact without leading to more rapid vibrations that add to the overall force.

Working in Brown’s Engineering Research Center, Antolik recorded the experiments using high-speed cameras and used an impact measurement tool called an accelerometer. “The whole back corner gets a little bit wet when I’m doing the experiments,” he jokes.

As for swimmers looking to lessen the pain from their next belly flop, the key may be trying to cushion the impact of the slamming forces, perhaps with a padded wet-suit or some type of material or object with a spring to it.

“I suppose the moral of our story would be that the material should be chosen wisely so as to not make the situation worse,” Harris says.

The researchers are now looking at next steps in their research line, taking inspiration from diving birds.

“Biological studies of these birds have shown that they perform certain maneuvers as they enter the water to improve the conditions so they don’t experience such high forces,” Antolik says. “What we’re moving towards is trying to design what is essentially a robotic impactor that can perform some active maneuver during water entry to do the same for blunt objects.”

Additional coauthors are from the Naval Undersea Warfare Center and Brigham Young University. The Office of Naval Research and Naval Undersea Warfare Center supported the work.

Source: Brown University

Gulf War Illness significantly reduces the ability of white blood cells to make energy and creates a measurable biochemical difference in veterans who have the disease.

Gulf War Illness (GWI) affects approximately 250,000 US veterans.

“Historically, GWI has been diagnosed based on a veteran’s self-reported symptoms, such as exercise-induced fatigue, indigestion, dizziness, insomnia, or memory problems. There’s been no objective biochemical or molecular measurements doctors could use to diagnose it,” says lead author Joel Meyer, professor of environmental genomics at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment.

The new study provides measurements accessible in blood samples, which, though not sufficient to serve as a stand-alone diagnostic test, could be useful to help improve treatment for veterans suffering from Gulf War Illness by giving doctors a new way to assess whether a prescribed treatment is helping, Meyer says.

“Knowing this is an energetic deficiency can help us zero in on more effective ways to relieve the symptoms,” Meyer says. “Blood tests, repeated over the course of the treatment, would show if a veteran’s white blood cells are responding to a treatment and producing more energy.”

The research, published in PLOS ONE, reveals that Gulf War Illness inhibits white blood cells’ energy production by impairing the workings of the cells’ mitochondria, structures within the cell which extract energy from food and convert it into the chemical power needed to fuel growth, movement and other bodily processes and functions. Mitochondria are often referred to as the ‘power plants’ of the cell.

“The idea to investigate the role mitochondria might be playing in GWI came from Mike Falvo, one of my coauthors from Veteran Affairs and the New Jersey Medical School, who had noticed that a lot of GWI symptoms were similar to those associated with mitochondrial diseases,” says Meyer.

“So, we analyzed mitochondrial respiration and extracellular acidification, which are proxies for energy generation, in the white blood cells of 114 Gulf War veterans, 80 of whom had been diagnosed with GWI. We also looked for evidence of mitochondrial DNA damage and nuclear DNA damage.”

The analyses revealed no evidence of DNA damage, but they did show significantly lower levels of extracellular acidification and oxygen consumption in the white blood cells from veterans with GWI—signs that their mitochondria were generating less energy.

Follow-up blood tests on about a third of the veterans showed that some of these levels could vary over time, but the general pattern remained: the cells of veterans with GWI produced less energy.

The cause of Gulf War Illness is still unknown. To determine if environmental factors might play a role, Meyer and his colleagues turned to the veterans’ surveys of self-reported symptoms and their written recollections of their deployments.

“We found veterans who recalled being exposed to pesticides and pyridostigmine bromide, a drug used during the Gulf War as a pretreatment to protect troops from the harmful effects of nerve agents, were more likely to get GWI after deployment,” Meyer says. “An interesting question is how these effects have persisted so long after the exposures.”

Additional coauthors are from Duke, the US Department of Veteran Affairs’ War-Related Illness and Injury Study Center (WRIISC), and the New Jersey Medical School at Rutgers Biomedical and Health Science.

Funding came from the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs through the Gulf War Illness Research Program and the US Department of Veterans Affairs Clinical Sciences Research and Development Service.

The conclusions, opinions, interpretations, and recommendations contained in the paper are those of its authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the Department of Defense or Department of Veteran Affairs.

Source: Duke University

An extension of a smoking ban to communal areas of residential blocks and outdoor spaces in Singapore in 2013 may have prevented up to 20,000 heart attacks among adults aged 65 and above, research shows.

The findings, published in the journal BMJ Global Health, show that the extension of the smoking ban was associated with a monthly fall in the rate of heart attacks, with older people and men benefitting the most.

Second-hand smoke exposure is responsible for 1.3 million annual deaths around the globe, many of which are caused by heart attacks. But the existing evidence on the health benefits of comprehensive smoke-free laws, which many countries (67 since 2003) have implemented, is largely confined to indoor smoking bans rather than those for housing estates and outdoor spaces.

“Residents would likely frequent common areas in housing estates as part of their daily routine or when meeting with their friends and neighbors. If there are smokers around, these residents may be exposed to tobacco smoke,” says senior author Joel Aik, an adjunct assistant professor from the Health Services & Systems Research Programme at Duke-NUS. “Having smoking bans in these areas would reduce their exposure to the smoke and consequently, reduce their risk of heart attacks.”

In 2013, Singapore extended smoke-free legislation to all communal areas of residential blocks, where 80% of the population lives, as well as outdoor spaces, including covered linkways, overhead bridges, and within five meters (about 16 feet) of bus stops. This was further extended to reservoirs and all residential parks in 2016, and to more educational institutions as well as more types of buses and taxis in 2017.

To assess the impact of the various pieces of legislation on heart attack rates, the researchers analyzed monthly reports from the Singapore Myocardial Infarction Registry from January 2010 to December 2019. During this period, 133,868 heart attacks were reported, 87,763 (66%) of which occurred among men and 80,597 (60%) of which occurred among those aged 65 and above.

Before the 2013 extension, the rate of heart attacks among those aged 65 and above was around 10 times that of those under 65 years of age. The rate of cases among men was nearly double that of women. The overall number of heart attacks rose by a rate of 0.9 cases per million people every month before the 2013 extension. But afterwards, this rate fell to 0.6 cases per million people.

Seniors and men were the primary beneficiaries of the extended ban. The monthly fall in heart attack rate among those aged 65 and above was 5.9 cases per million people. This fall in the rate is almost 15 times greater than that in younger individuals, which stood at 0.4 cases per million people.

According to their calculations, the scientists also estimated that an additional 19,591 heart attacks might have occurred in those aged 65 and above, compared with 1,325 in the under-65s had the legislation not been enacted. Potentially, 4,748 cases were averted in men.

The impact was not as clear when studying the impact of legislation in subsequent years. From 2016, the extension of smoke-free laws to reservoirs and more parks was not associated with a significant reduction in the number of heart attacks. This could have been due to better diagnostic technology, which can detect more cases of heart attack.

While the 2017 legislation was not associated with a significant decline in overall heart attack incidence, the researchers found that the average decline in the rates following this prohibition extension to more universities and more types of buses and taxis was consistent among those of different age groups and among men and women.

This consistency in findings suggests that the ban may well have been beneficial though more studies are required to validate this.

Source: Duke-NUS

This year saw some long-predicted industry consolidation finally come to pass as Paris-based satellite operator Eutelsat acquired Starlink competitor OneWeb and Viasat merged with London-based Inmarsat to give the Americas-focused Viasat global coverage. SpaceNews journalists considers these among the most important deals of 2023. We polled past winners of the SpaceNews Awards for their input on Deal of the Year and five other award categories.

We’ll reveal our final pick for Deal of the Year on Tuesday, Dec. 5, during the SpaceNews 2023 Icon Awards event at the InterContinental Washington D.C. – The Wharf.

Tickets are on sale now. Early bird pricing ends Nov. 8.

Stay tuned as we spotlight the honorees for the other award categories in the days ahead!

SpaceNews 2023 Icon Awards — Deal of the Year honorees*

* Category winner to be announced Dec. 5

Viasat acquires Inmarsat

Viasat’s expansion beyond the North and South American broadband markets it has served from GEO for decades got a turbo boost from its acquisition of maritime-heavy Inmarsat and its fleet of 15 GEO satellites. Scale has its advantages in a consolidating market.

The combined Viasat-Inmarsat, with 60% more revenue than Viasat alone, is better positioned to absorb the loss of ViaSat-3 Americas to a crippling deployment failure.

Eutelsat acquires OneWeb

Eutelsat’s OneWeb merger has created the only global operator with wholly owned satellites across GEO and LEO, which the group says will be critical for meeting emerging connectivity needs.

U.K.-based OneWeb is also a timely shot in the arm for the French operator’s expansion out of a declining satellite TV market. To achieve their deal, they not only had to clear shareholder and regulatory hurdles, but also navigate the political issues surrounding the British government’s continuedstake in OneWeb.

Telesat awards Lightspeed contracts to MDA and SpaceX

Telesat finally has funds for a LEO broadband network after pivoting from Thales Alenia Space to smaller but equally capable satellites from MDA. 

The Canadian operator booked SpaceX for 14 launches between mid-2026 and mid-2027 to fully deploy all 198 satellites Lightspeed needs to provide global coverage.

While Telesat had hoped to start expanding out of GEO years earlier, the company expects the delays will be a blessing in disguise for a constellation now set to be $2 billion cheaper with MDA.

L3 Harris acquires Aerojet Rocketdyne

The completion of L3Harris’ $4.7 billion deal this summer to acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne capped a period of uncertainty for the storied rocket engine manufacturer. Lockheed Martin in 2020 sought to buy it for $4.4 billion. That acquisition was blocked by the Federal Trade Commission.

The combination strengthens L3Harris’ position in propulsion systems and the space market through expanded capabilities in technology for defense, civil and commercial applications.  For Aerojet, being part of L3Harris provides greater financial scale and access to capital that can support and accelerate Aerojet’s R&D and product development efforts.

One of these honorees will be recognized as the Deal of the Year during the SpaceNews 2023 Icon Awards.

Visit www.spacenewsawards.com for event updates and to purchase tickets.

Related

When colleges host STEM Career Days, the high school students who attend are far more likely to pursue a career in a STEM related field, a new study shows.

The findings not only highlight the benefits of college recruiters introducing high school students to STEM-related opportunities, but they can also help increase and diversify the STEM workforce in the United States.

Michael Williams, an assistant professor in the University of Missouri College of Education and Human Development, analyzed a nation-wide survey that Harvard University conducted that asked nearly 16,000 college students if they attended a college-run STEM Career Day while in high school.

He found that the students who attended were far more likely to have STEM-related career aspirations compared to the students who did not attend.

“Now that we have found that this type of intervention works for turning that potential interest in STEM into career aspirations in STEM, we can work on designing these interventions in a way to be even more effective and accessible to develop a more diverse STEM workforce,” says Williams, who is also a faculty fellow in the division of inclusion, diversity, and equity.

“If you want someone to be good at something, you want them to develop a sense of efficacy, which is about putting them in a position where they can see themselves doing it and succeeding at it, and seeing other people that look like them doing it as well.”

When Williams was pursuing a master’s degree in computer information technology, he remembers being the only Black student in classes such as computer engineering and differential equations. He also remembers the classes being disproportionately made up of international students.

“The United States trails a lot of global competitors in the production of STEM talent, especially in areas like sophisticated technology and quantitative methodologies,” Williams says. “The National Science Foundation has pushed for broadening participation in STEM fields and increasing diversity for populations that have previously been excluded from STEM-related opportunities. So, I am passionate about reaching people earlier in the educational pipeline and seeing what interventions help turn interest into career aspiration.”

The study appears in the International Journal of Science Education.

Source: University of Missouri

A new magnetic gel could speed healing of diabetic wounds, reduce the rates of recurrence, and in turn, lower the incidents of limb amputations, researchers report.

Diabetic patients, whose natural wound-healing capabilities are compromised, often develop chronic wounds that are slow to heal. Such non-healing wounds could cause serious infections resulting in painful outcomes such as limb amputation.

The new treatment involves the application of a bandage pre-loaded with a hydrogel containing skin cells for healing and magnetic particles. To maximize therapeutic results, a wireless external magnetic device is used to activate skin cells and accelerate the wound healing process. The ideal duration of magnetic stimulation is about one to two hours.

Lab tests showed the treatment coupled with magnetic stimulation healed diabetic wounds about three times faster than current conventional approaches. Furthermore, while the research has focused on healing diabetic foot ulcers, the technology has potential for treating a wide range of complex wounds such as burns.

“Conventional dressings do not play an active role in healing wounds,” says Andy Tay, assistant professor who leads the team comprising researchers from the biomedical engineering department at NUS College of Design and Engineering as well as the NUS Institute for Health Innovation & Technology. “They merely prevent the wound from worsening and patients need to be scheduled for dressing change every two or three days. It is a huge cost to our healthcare system and an inconvenience to patients.”

In contrast, the new invention takes a comprehensive all-in-one approach to wound healing, accelerating the process on several fronts.

“Our technology addresses multiple critical factors associated with diabetic wounds, simultaneously managing elevated glucose levels in the wound area, activating dormant skin cells near the wound, restoring damaged blood vessels, and repairing the disrupted vascular network within the wound,” Tay says.

The researchers describe the gel in a paper published in Advanced Materials.

Sweet spot for treating diabetic wounds

Currently, more than half a billion people globally are living with diabetes and this number is expected to rise significantly. Chronic diabetic wounds such as foot ulcers (one of the most common and hardest to treat wounds) have therefore become a major global healthcare challenge.

Traditional treatments for these wounds are often unsatisfactory, leading to recurring and persistent health issues and—in a high number of cases—limb amputation.

Every year, there are around 9.1 to 26.1 million cases of diabetic foot ulcer worldwide, and around 15 to 25% of patients with diabetes will develop a diabetic foot ulcer during their lifetime. Singapore has one of the highest rates of lower limb amputation due to diabetes globally, averaging around four per day.

Skin cells experience mechanical forces continuously from normal daily activities. However, patients with wounds are usually advised not to carry out rigorous activities, such as walking, and this could kill the remaining cells essential for healing.

“What our team has achieved is to identify a sweet spot by applying gentle mechanical stimulation,” Tay says. “The result is that the remaining skin cells get to ‘work-out’ to heal wounds, but not to the extent that it kills them.”

The specially designed wound-healing gel is loaded with two types of FDA-approved skin cells—keratinocytes (essential for skin repair) and fibroblast (for formation of connective tissue)—and tiny magnetic particles. When combined with a dynamic magnetic field generated by an external device, the mechanical stimulation of the gel encourages dermal fibroblasts to become more active.

Lab tests showed that the increased fibroblast activity generated by the magnetic wound-healing gel increases the cells’ growth rate by approximately 240% and more than doubles their production of collagen—a crucial protein for wound healing. It also improves communication with keratinocytes to promote the formation of new blood vessels.

“The approach we are taking not only accelerates wound healing but also promotes overall wound health and reduces the chances of recurrence,” Tay says.

Chronic wounds and burns

While the magnetic wound-healing gel has shown great promise in improving diabetic wound healing, it could also revolutionize the treatment of other complex wound types.

“The magneto-responsive hydrogel, combined with wireless magneto-induced dynamic mechanical stimulation, addresses fundamental challenges in wound healing, such as creating a conducive microenvironment and promoting tissue regeneration,” says co-first author Shou Yufeng, research fellow from the biomedical engineering department at NUS College of Design and Engineering.

“These principles and our technology’s adaptability, as well as its general ease of use for patients, means that it can be applied to improve wound healing in various situations beyond diabetes, including burns and chronic non-diabetic ulcers.”

The researchers are conducting more tests to further refine the magnetic wound-healing gel to improve its effectiveness. They are also collaborating with a clinical partner to test the effectiveness of the gel using diabetic human tissues.

“This is major step forward in active wound care,” Tay says. “Our goal is to provide an effective and convenient wound-healing solution that improves outcomes for millions around the world.”

“Wound healing, especially in the field of diabetic foot ulcers, has always been a challenging arena. Diabetic foot patients do not heal as well as normal patients and their healing journey is often prolonged,” says Francis Wong Keng Lin, assistant professor and a consultant in the orthopaedic surgery department at Sengkang General Hospital, who was not involved with the study.

“Advancements in wound healing technologies will reduce the duration of the patient journey and would allow them to return to their lives as quickly as possible, hence improving productivity and quality of life.”

The researchers have filed a patent for this innovation. Additional researchers from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research; Nanyang Technological University; Sun Yat-sen University; and Wuhan University of Technology collaborated on the work.

Source: NUS

Americans have less confidence in vaccines to address a variety of illnesses than they did just a year or two ago, and more people accept misinformation about vaccines and COVID-19, according to a recent health survey.

The survey conducted October 5 to 12, 2023, with a panel of over 1,500 United States adults, finds that the number of Americans who think vaccines approved for use in the United States are safe dropped to 71% from 77% in April 2021. The percentage of adults who don’t think vaccines approved in the US are safe grew to 16% from 9% over that same two-and-a-half-year period, report the researchers from the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania.

Despite concerted efforts by news organizations, public health officials, scientists, and fact-checkers (including APPC’s project FactCheck.org) to counter viral misinformation about vaccination and COVID-19, the survey finds that some false or unproven claims about them are more widely accepted today than two to three years ago. Although the proportion of the American public that holds these beliefs is, in some cases, still relatively small, the survey finds growth in misinformation acceptance across many questions touching on vaccination.

“There are warning signs in these data that we ignore at our peril,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and director of the survey. “Growing numbers now distrust health-protecting, life-saving vaccines.”

COVID-19 vaccine: Less than two-thirds of Americans (63%) think is it safer to get the COVID-19 vaccine than the COVID-19 disease, a decline from 75% in April 2021.

Ivermectin: Over a quarter (26%) incorrectly think ivermectin is an effective treatment for COVID-19, up dramatically from 10% in September 2021.

Autism: A small but growing number (16%) believe that “increased vaccines are why so many kids have autism these days,” up from 10% in April 2021.

Return to normal: Asked when they expected to return to their normal, pre-COVID life, two-thirds (67%) say they already have. Three-quarters (75%) say they never or rarely wear a mask or face covering.

The survey data come from the 13th wave of a nationally representative panel of 1,559 US adults, first empaneled in April 2021, conducted for the Annenberg Public Policy Center by SSRS, an independent market research company. This wave of the Annenberg Science and Public Health Knowledge (ASAPH) survey was fielded October 5 to 12, 2023, and has a margin of sampling error (MOE) of ± 3.4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. All figures are rounded to the nearest whole number and may not add to 100%. Combined subcategories may not add to totals in the topline and text due to rounding.

The policy center has been tracking the American public’s knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors regarding vaccination, COVID-19, flu, RSV, and other consequential health issues through this survey panel over the past two-and-a-half years.

Download the topline and the methods report.

Source: Penn

Researchers have developed a highly sensitive blood test that can detect a key protein produced by cancer cells.

The test shows promise for early cancer detection, the researchers report.

Most cancers become deadly by keeping a low profile, causing no symptoms until they’re too advanced to treat. Ovarian and gastroesophageal cancers are among the most notorious for this sly disease progression, often leading to late-stage diagnoses.

Unlike many cancer tests that are limited in scope, expensive, or rely on invasive tissue sampling, the new method is a low-cost, multi-cancer detector that can pick up the presence of the telltale protein, known as LINE-1-ORF1p, in a tiny amount of blood in less than two hours.

“The assay has groundbreaking potential as an early diagnostic test for lethal cancers,” says Michael P. Rout, head of the Laboratory of Cellular and Structural Biology at Rockefeller University. “These kinds of ultrasensitive detection instruments are poised to improve patient outcomes in transformative ways.”

Detecting cancer biomarkers

Cancer biomarker detection is a young and growing field. There are a number of such biomarkers, but they can come with drawbacks. Some require surgical biopsies. Others are employed only after the emergence of symptoms, which can be too late for an effective intervention. Most are normal human proteins that have variability from person to person, making a single value hard to interpret. And many are targeted to a specific cancer, narrowing their range.

But recently, an important new biomarker for earlier detection may have emerged. That protein, known as LINE-1 ORF1p, came onto researchers’ radar about a decade ago. LINE-1 is a retrotransposon, a virus-like element present in every human cell that replicates through a copy-and-paste mechanism, resulting in a new copy in a new position in the genome. ORF1p is a protein it produces at high levels in cancer.

“Transposons are normally expressed in sperm and egg and during embryogenesis, so there are some circumstances where you have nonpathobiological expression of transposons,” says coauthor John LaCava, a research associate professor who specializes in LINE-1 research. “But otherwise, these ‘jumping genes’ are silenced within the genome, because their activity creates stress and insults in the cell.”

Most of the time, the body keeps LINE-1 in check.

“There are layers of mechanisms that prevent LINE-1 from being expressed and producing ORF1p, so we can use the presence of the protein as a proxy for an unhealthy cell that no longer has control over its transcriptome,” LaCava says. “You shouldn’t find ORF1p in the bloodstream of a healthy person.”

Over the past five years, he says, “it’s become abundantly clear that these proteins become highly elevated in most cancers,” including many of the most common and lethal cancers of the esophagus, colon, lung, breast, prostate, ovaries, uterus, pancreas, and head and neck.

Because carcinoma cells make ORF1p from the onset of disease, researchers have long sought a sensitive, accurate test to detect ORF1p as early as possible. The ability to spot it in patients before a cancer has a chance to spread could potentially save lives.

Custom nanobodies from llamas

Rockefeller researchers teamed up with lead investigators from Mass General Brigham, the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, along with other partnering institutions, to engineer a fast, low-cost assay able to detect ORF1p in plasma, which accounts for more than half of the content of human blood.

The new study uses a single-molecule-based detection technology known as Simoa that was developed by coauthor David Walt, of Harvard. The Rockefeller team contributed custom nanobodies derived and engineered from llamas to act as capture reagents that ensnare the ORF1p protein and as sensitive probes to detect it.

“We developed these reagents as part of our mission to capture and describe the molecular associations of ORF1p with other proteins in colorectal cancers,” says LaCava. “We knew that most colorectal cancers have an abundance of LINE-1 proteins, so we reasoned that the interactions they form could be dysregulating normal cell functions in ways that benefit cancer. Isolating LINE-1 particles allowed us to have a closer look at these interactions. Later, it was clear that our collaborators at Harvard could make use of the same reagents for their developing biomarker assay, so we shared them.”

The researchers found that the assay was highly accurate at detecting ORF1p in the blood samples of patients with a variety of cancers, including ovarian, gastroesophageal, and colorectal cancers. It costs less than $3 to produce and returns fast results.

“We were shocked by how well this test worked across cancer types,” says Martin Taylor, of the pathology department at Massachusetts General Hospital and lead author of the study in the journal Cancer Discovery.

The researchers also analyzed the plasma of 400 healthy people aged 20–90 who’d donated blood to the Mass General Brigham Biobank; ORF1p was undetectable in 97–99% of them. Of the five people who did have detectable ORF1p, the person with the highest level was found six months later to have advanced prostate cancer.

Cancer therapy response

Another potential use of the assay is monitoring how a patient is responding to cancer therapy. If a treatment is effective, the ORF1p level in the patient’s blood should drop, LaCava says. In one part of the study, the researchers studied 19 patients being treated for gastroesophageal cancer; in the 13 people who responded to the treatment, levels of ORF1p fell below the detection limit of the assay.

Tracking the protein could potentially be incorporated into routine healthcare, LaCava says. “During a healthy time in your life, you could have your ORF1p levels measured to establish a baseline. Then your doctor would just keep an eye out for any spikes in ORF1p levels, which could be indicative of a change in your state of health. While there might be some minor ORF1p fluctuations here and there, a spike would be a cause for a deeper investigation.”

The study results also illustrate the immense potential of nanobody reagents generated through the study of interactomics, Rout says. Interactomics seeks to understand the dynamic interactions of the millions of individual components in a cell, particularly its proteins and nucleic acids. These interactions form macromolecular complexes that transmit information and control cellular behaviors. Pathogenic changes in these interactions underlie all diseases.

“There’s an essential need for much better tools to reveal and dissect interactomes that’s only beginning to be met,” Rout says. “To that end, we often collaborate with other institutions on the development of reagents such as our llama-derived nanobodies. The resulting products are not mere research tools—they have enormous potential in the hands of doctors.”

Source: Rockefeller University

Two new studies show emerging awareness of the new 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline among both policymakers and the general public—but also point to potential areas of improvement for the vital nationwide service.

In July 2022, “988” became the new number for the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, which provides a phone, text, and chat resource for people who are experiencing suicidal thoughts, hopelessness, substance use crises, and other psychological distress.

Similar to dialing 911 in emergencies, the use of a three-digit dialing code for mental health crises is designed to be accessible and easy to remember.

However, public awareness of 988 is off to a slow start, according to a survey conducted this spring. To better understand whether people know about and use 988 depending on their mental well-being, and to get a sense of how much policymakers are communicating about 988, the researchers undertook two studies about the 988 Lifeline during its nascency.

Use and knowledge of 988 suicide lifeline

In one study, the researchers surveyed 5,058 US adults to see if people with varying degrees of psychological distress had different levels of awareness and use of 988.

In the nationally representative, web-based survey of US adults conducted in June 2023, they asked participants about their mental health—including whether they feel nervous, hopeless, depressed, or worthless, and whether these feelings hurt their ability to function.

They also asked participants whether they had heard of 988, if they had used 988 themselves, and about their likelihood of using 988 in the future if they or a loved one were experiencing a crisis or suicidality.

The researchers found that people with serious and moderate psychological distress were significantly more likely to have heard of 988 (47.4% and 45%) than those without distress (40.4%). In addition, 6% of people with serious psychological distress reported using the 988 Lifeline, making them more than 30 times as likely to use the lifeline compared to those with no distress (0.2%) and six times more likely to use 988 than those with moderate distress (1%).

Notably, when asked if they would use 988 in the future if needed, only 30% of those reporting serious psychological distress who had used 988 were very likely to use it again.

“Our findings signal a need for research about satisfaction with the 988 Lifeline among people with serious psychological distress and the extent to which 988—and the resources it connects users to—sufficiently meets their needs,” says Jonathan Purtle, associate professor in the New York University School of Global Public Health, who led the research.

“Launching the 988 hotline has been a critical step for addressing America’s expanding need for mental health services, but we have to get to the bottom of why so many users who were in serious distress wouldn’t use it again—whether that means better training is needed, more resources or other solutions,” says Michael A. Lindsey, dean and professor of social work at the NYU Silver School of Social Work.

Policymakers on social media

In the second study, the researchers examined how elected state policymakers communicated about 988 on social media before and after its launch in July 2022. The researchers analyzed Facebook and Twitter (now known as X) posts mentioning 988 from the accounts of state legislators and Washington, DC council members throughout 2022—about six months before and after the launch of 988.

A total of 1,000 state legislators published 2,041 social media posts about 988 during the period studied. Posts were the most prevalent in California (132.7 per 10,000 posts) and least prevalent in West Virginia (1.4 per 10,000 posts). Democratic legislators were 31% more likely to post about 988 than were Republican legislators.

In addition, more than half of the posts (54%) occurred in July 2022—around the launch of 988. Another 22% took place in September 2022, which was Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, and few posts were published during other months.

“We found that many state legislators actively communicated about 988 when it was launched in July 2022, but that communication was not sustained over time,” says Purtle. “Robust public awareness of the 988 Lifeline and willingness to use in crisis situations is critical to realizing its public health impact.”

Additional coauthors are from NYU, Weill Cornell, and Vibrant Emotional Health, which supports coordination of the 988 Lifeline.

Source: NYU

Researchers have replicated conditions that existed 4,500 years ago to show how wind moved against rock formations to possibly shape the Great Sphinx of Giza.

Historians and archaeologists have, over centuries, explored the mysteries behind the Great Sphinx: What did it originally look like? What was it designed to represent? What was its original name?

But less attention has been paid to a foundational, and controversial, question: What was the terrain the ancient Egyptians came across when they began to build this instantly recognizable structure—and did these natural surroundings have a hand in its formation?

“Our findings offer a possible ‘origin story’ for how Sphinx-like formations can come about from erosion,” says Leif Ristroph, an associate professor at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and senior author of the study, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Fluids.

“Our laboratory experiments showed that surprisingly Sphinx-like shapes can, in fact, come from materials being eroded by fast flows.”

The work centered on replicating yardangs—unusual rock formations found in deserts resulting from wind-blown dust and sand—and exploring how the Great Sphinx could have originated as a yardang that was subsequently detailed by humans into the form of the widely recognized statue.

To do so, Ristroph and his colleagues in NYU’s Applied Mathematics Laboratory took mounds of soft clay with harder, less erodible material embedded inside—mimicking the terrain in northeastern Egypt, where the Great Sphinx sits.

They then washed these formations with a fast-flowing stream of water—to replicate wind—that carved and reshaped them, eventually reaching a Sphinx-like formation. The harder or more resistant material became the “head” of the lion and many other features—such as an undercut “neck,” “paws” laid out in front on the ground, and arched “back”—developed.

“Our results provide a simple origin theory for how Sphinx-like formations can come about from erosion,” says Ristroph. “There are, in fact, yardangs in existence today that look like seated or lying animals, lending support to our conclusions.”

“The work may also be useful to geologists as it reveals factors that affect rock formations—namely, that they are not homogeneous or uniform in composition,” he adds. “The unexpected shapes come from how the flows are diverted around the harder or less-erodible parts.”

The National Science Foundation supported the work.

Source: NYU