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Researchers have created a device that uses just solar energy to convert greenhouse gases and plastic trash into sustainable fuels and other useful items.

The device was created by researchers from the University of Cambridge, and it is the first solar-powered reactor to be able to simultaneously transform two waste streams into two chemical products.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) and polymers are transformed in the reactor into a variety of products that are helpful in a variety of sectors. In experiments, CO2 was transformed into syngas, a crucial component of sustainable liquid fuels, and plastic bottles into glycolic acid, a substance used extensively in the cosmetics sector. By altering the catalyst utilized in the reactor, the system is easily tweaked to yield different products.

In order to move toward a more sustainable, circular economy, it is crucial to transform plastics and greenhouse gases—two of the greatest dangers to the environment—into usable and valued products. The journal Nature Synthesis reports the findings.

The Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry's Professor Erwin Reisner is the senior author of the study and stated that turning garbage into something useful using solar energy is one of the main goals of his research. "Plastic pollution is a major issue across the world, and frequently a large portion of the plastics we put in recycling bins are burned or landfilled."

Reisner is also the director of the Cambridge Circular Plastics Centre (CirPlas), which combines innovative ideas with doable solutions to eradicate plastic waste.

Other solar-powered "recycling" technologies have the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and combat plastic waste, but they have not yet been integrated into a single process.

Subhajit Bhattacharjee, the paper's co-first author, stated that a solar-powered system that could reduce greenhouse emissions and plastic pollution at the same time "may be a game-changer in the creation of a circular economy."

According to co-first author Dr. Motiar Rahaman, "We also need something that is tuneable, so that you can quickly make modifications based on the ultimate output you desire."

The scientists created an integrated reactor with two distinct compartments: one for greenhouse gases and one for plastic. The reactor makes use of a perovskite-based light absorber, a viable substitute for silicon in next-generation solar cells.

The group created several catalysts that were included into the light absorber. The ultimate product might then be altered by altering the catalyst. Testing of the reactor revealed that it was capable of converting PET plastic bottles and CO2 into several carbon-based fuels, such as CO, syngas, or formate, in addition to glycolic acid, with high efficiency. The rate at which these compounds were generated by the Cambridge-developed reactor was likewise significantly higher than that of traditional photocatalytic CO2 reduction methods.

With our technology, you literally just throw a light at it and it starts converting toxic items into something helpful and sustainable, according to Rahaman. "Usually, CO2 conversion needs a lot of energy," he added. We lacked a system that could effectively and selectively produce high-value goods before this one.

We're now producing quite straightforward carbon-based chemicals, but in the future, we may be able to adjust the system to produce far more complicated products by simply switching the catalyst, according to Bhattacharjee.

The European Research Council has provided more funds to Reisner to aid in the development of their solar-powered reactor. They intend to improve the reactor during the following five years in order to manufacture more sophisticated chemicals. Similar methods, according to the researchers, might one day be utilized to create a recycling facility that is totally solar-powered.

If we're going to effectively solve the climate catastrophe and safeguard the natural world, we must develop a circular economy where garbage is turned into valuable items rather than being thrown into landfills, according to Reisner. And since the Sun is used to fuel these solutions, the process is sustainable and clean.

A 66-year-old man may be the sixth person to be cured of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, following a stem cell transplant, according to research published on Wednesday (July 27). The patient, who requests anonymity, is the oldest individual to have had the treatment and achieved sustained remission of the illness.

The guy, referred to as the "City of Hope patient" after the Los Angeles hospital where he received treatment, was initially identified as having the HIV virus in 1988, according to a statement released by City of Hope. Like many others, the patient claimed, "I feared my 1988 HIV diagnosis was a death sentence."

According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the first antiretroviral treatment, or HIV medicine, named azidothymidine (AZT), was licensed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration just a year before, in March 1987. Combination therapy for HIV didn't become widely used until the middle of the 1990s; these medicines included two to three HIV medications to increase treatment effectiveness and help patients avoid developing drug resistance. The current gold standard of care for the treatment of HIV is such combo medicines.

For more than 31 years, the City of Hope patient received antiretroviral medications to manage his HIV. According to NBC News, the man's ailment had at one time developed into AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), which meant that his white blood cell count had dropped to dangerously low levels (opens in new tab). Before switching to a very efficient combination antiretroviral therapy in the 1990s, he tried AZT and a few other early HIV drugs that were administered individually.

Acute myelogenous leukemia, commonly known as acute myeloid leukemia, or AML, a malignancy of the blood and bone marrow, struck the patient many decades later, in 2018. Doctors used blood stem cells from a donor who had an unique genetic mutation to perform a blood stem cell transplant as a cancer and HIV therapy. The homozygous CCR5 delta 32 mutation makes its bearer immune to HIV by changing the route through which the virus typically enters the body's white blood cells.

These altered, HIV-resistant cells gradually acquired control of the man's immune system after the transplant. The patient ceased using antiretroviral drugs in March 2021, carefully monitored by his medical team, and there have been no indications of HIV replication in his body since that time.

According to the researchers, the guy is in long-term remission because there hasn't been any sign of the virus in his system for the past 17 months. If his health doesn't change, they may later formally pronounce him "cured," according to NBC News.

The so-called Berlin patient, the first person to be cured of HIV, had a condition that is very similar to the City of Hope patient's.

The Berlin patient, subsequently identified as Timothy Ray Brown, similarly acquired AML and had bone marrow transplanted from a donor with a genetic mutation that made them immune to HIV. (Blood stem cells can be found in bone marrow.) According to NBC News, two further patients from Düsseldorf and London were also successfully treated using the same method, and most recently, one lady was successfully treated following a stem cell transplant utilizing umbilical cord blood cells, as previously reported by Live Science.

David D. Ho, one of the top AIDS specialists in the world and the head of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Columbia University, told The Washington Post that the case of the City of Hope patient "is yet another example that mirrors Timothy Brown from years ago" (opens in new tab). However, Ho noted that the majority of HIV patients cannot receive such medicines because of the hazards associated with transplant surgery and the rarity of the HIV-resistant mutation.

According to NBC News, Dr. Sharon Lewin, an infectious-disease specialist at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity at the University of Melbourne in Australia, said at a news conference that even though a transplant is typically not an option for people with HIV, these cases are still intriguing, inspiring, and shed light on the search for a cure. According to The Washington Post, several research teams are seeking to create genome editing methods that might give patients the HIV-resistant mutation.

At the Montreal 2022 International AIDS Conference, Dr. Jana K. Dickter, an associate clinical professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at City of Hope, discussed the case of the City of Hope patient.

According to a peer-reviewed study published in the scholarly journal Remote Sensing in May, Israeli researchers have developed a mechanism to forecast earthquakes 48 hours in advance with 80% accuracy.

How did they solve the problem?

The Ariel University and Center for Research & Development Eastern Branch research team was able to assess potential triggers for several significant earthquakes that occurred in the last 20 years by examining changes in the Earth's ionosphere, the thin layer of atmosphere that meets the vacuum of space.

Major earthquakes were identified by the researchers as those that were greater than Mw 6 on the Moment magnitude scale, which gauges an earthquake's size based on seismic displacement.

The team's solution involved using a machine learning support vector machine (SVM) algorithm to determine the electron charge density of the ionospheric total electron content using GPS map data.

They discovered that an earthquake may be predicted with an accuracy of 80% using this approach.

Additionally, with an accuracy rate of 85.7%, the researchers were also able to forecast when there won't be an earthquake in a certain location.

Researchers

Drs. Yuval Reuvani, Li-Ad Gotlieb, and Nimrod Inbar of Ariel University, the Eastern Branch of the Center for Research & Development, and PhD student Said Asali from the Department of Computer Science at Ariel University were the study's principal investigators. Israel's Energy Ministry and Israel Science Foundation provided funding for the study.

It's possible that the human immune system's battle with gonorrhea has the positive side effect of encouraging healthy brain cells later in life.

This little improvement in cognitive function in our later years may have helped ensure that grandmas were intelligent enough for evolution to preserve them.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego are getting closer to some theories for why humans have survived past the eras where we can no longer reproduce, despite the fact that it is incredibly difficult – and maybe impossible – to do so.

Researchers working under the direction of molecular medicine professor Ajit Varki revealed in 2015 that humans differ from other primates in that we have a special form of immunological receptor that guards against Alzheimer's disease.

The scientists discovered in a report released this month that the emergence of this mutant immunological receptor in our species wasn't completely random, but rather was the product of strong selection pressure over a relatively short period of time.

The study revealed that this variety of immune receptors was not included into the genomes of some of our closest ancestors, Neanderthals and Denisovans. According to the researchers, something compelled us to create this unique immunological receptor early in our evolutionary history.

The most likely culprits are contagious infections unique to humans, including Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which try to blend in by dressing in the same sugar coating as human cells, deceiving immune cells on patrol into believing the bacteria are harmless.

The human immune system became highly adept at being duped into believing that gonorrhea was simply another human cell. However, the human immune system managed to strike back.

The researchers demonstrated that the newly developed immune receptor, as opposed to the earlier variant, could recognize the disguise and destroy the invasive germs.

Because gonorrhea may interfere with human reproduction, eliminating this illness is important for the survival of the species.

huCD33 is the name of the updated immunological receptor. It has long been the focus of research by evolutionary biologists because of the way this version has been altered into two barely distinct structures within our body.

The researchers hypothesize that once developed, this immunological receptor was likely co-opted by brain immune cells known as microglia for a distinct purpose: defense against aging.

Normally, the immune system of a person doesn't deliberately target itself, but when a cell begins to degrade, it must.

The huCD33 receptor had the added benefit of being able to identify deteriorating brain tissue and thereby safeguard cognitive function in old age. It appears to have evolved as a response to sneaky bacteria.

The huCD33 receptor is used by microglia to eliminate harmed brain cells and amyloid plaques linked to Alzheimer's disease. It is debatable whether this may have paved the way for evolution to extend our lives by a few precious years in order to facilitate the raising of families.

Grandparents benefit the human race by helping to care for children and transferring valuable cultural knowledge. And the cause of that may be gonorrhea.

According to recent study from the University of Virginia School of Medicine, the loss of the male sex chromosome as men age causes the heart muscle to scar and can result in fatal heart failure. The discovery could provide some insight into why males often pass away at an earlier age than women.

The new finding, according to UVA researcher Kenneth Walsh, PhD, implies that males who experience Y chromosome loss—which is believed to affect 40% of people over the age of 70—may benefit significantly from a current medication that combats potentially harmful tissue scarring. He believes that the medication could help mitigate the negative effects of the chromosomal loss, which could emerge not only in the heart but in other areas of the body as well.

In the US, women typically live five more years than men do. According to Walsh, the new discovery may account for roughly four of the five-year discrepancy.

"Men tend to pass away sooner than women, especially beyond the age of 60. They appear to age physiologically more quickly "Walsh, the center's director for hematovascular biology at UVA, said. "In the US alone, there are more than 160 million men. The number of years lost owing to the male survival disadvantage is astounding. This new study sheds light on why males live shorter lives than women."

Loss of Chromosomes and Heart Health

Men have an X and a Y chromosome, whereas women have two X chromosomes. But as men age, a small percentage of their cells start to lose the Y chromosome. Smokers seem to be an exception to this rule. The loss mostly affects blood cells and other cells that change quickly. Children of males who demonstrate Y chromosome loss do not inherit it because Y chromosome loss does not occur in male reproductive cells. Men who lose their Y chromosome are more likely to die early and develop age-related diseases like Alzheimer's disease, according to earlier research. The latest study by Walsh, however, is thought to be the first concrete proof that chromosomal deletion directly has a negative impact on men's health.

Walsh, of UVA's Division of Cardiovascular Medicine and the Robert M. Berne Cardiovascular Research Center, and his group created a unique mouse model to better study the impact of Y chromosome deletion in the blood using cutting-edge CRISPR gene-editing technology. They discovered that the loss hastened age-related disorders, increased the mice's susceptibility to cardiac scarring, and accelerated their mortality. The investigators found that this wasn't only an inflammatory response. Instead, the mice experienced a complicated series of immune system reactions that resulted in a condition known as fibrosis across the body. The researchers hypothesize that this immune system struggle might hasten the onset of illness.

The repercussions of Y chromosome deletion in male humans were also studied by the researchers. They performed three studies on data taken from the UK Biobank, a huge biological database, and discovered that Y chromosome deletion was linked to heart failure and cardiovascular illness. The researchers discovered that as chromosomal loss rose, so did the probability of mortality.

Potential Therapy

The results show that males may live longer, healthier lives if the impacts of Y chromosome depletion are targeted. Walsh points out that pirfenidone, a medication currently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a kind of lung scarring, may be a viable therapy option. Additionally, the medication is being evaluated for the treatment of heart failure and chronic renal disease, both of which are characterized by tissue scarring. According to Walsh's study, males with Y chromosomal deletion may respond particularly well to this medication and other types of antifibrotic medications that are now being researched, however further studies are required to confirm this.

There is currently no quick technique for doctors to identify which males lose their Y chromosomes. An affordable polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, similar to those used for COVID-19 testing, has been created by Walsh's partner Lars A. Forsberg of Uppsala University in Sweden, however it is mostly utilized in Walsh and Forsberg's labs. But Walsh sees a change coming: "Maybe this becomes a common diagnostic test," he said. "If interest in this continues and it's demonstrated to have usefulness in terms of being predictive for men's illness and may lead to tailored therapy."

"All of our cells' DNA eventually develops mutations as we age. This involves the complete deletion of the Y chromosome in a subpopulation of male cells. Age-related disorders and the aging process itself can be better understood by realizing that the body is a mosaic of acquired mutations "said Walsh, a student at UVA's Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics Department. Research on Y chromosome deletion and other acquired abnormalities holds considerable potential for the creation of specialized medications that address these particular mutations.