More Science!

Bright future for medicines and farming after fluorine discovery

July 30, 2024 Ellen Phiddian

US researchers have figured out an environmentally friendly way to mix fluorine into carbon molecules using enzymes and light.

The discovery illuminates a path for safer and more ecologically sound materials, particularly pharmaceuticals and agricultural chemicals.

“This work could pave the way for new, greener technologies in chemical production,” says senior researcher Professor Huimin Zhao, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The discovery is published in Science.

Fluorine atoms can be very powerful additions to bioactive materials. They can make medicines easier to absorb, more stable in biological systems, and better at interacting with other proteins. About 20% of pharmaceuticals on the market contain fluorine.

But these organic (carbon-containing) molecules all typically need a bond between a fluorine atom and a carbon atom to work.

This bond is rare in nature, and difficult to make in a lab. At the moment, most fluorine-containing substances are made using super-toxic hydrogen fluoride, which can be fatal with just a small splash to the skin.

This has spurred chemists to hunt for other ways to fluorinate molecules.

In this research, the scientists used a protein that responds to light, called a photoenzyme.

Using this enzyme, they were able to add fluorine to a class of molecules called olefins. These carbon-containing molecules are widely used as a feedstock in the chemical industry, because they’re easy to turn into a range of other molecules.

The reaction is also “stereoselective”: it can differentiate between molecules that are chemically identical, but optically different. This is a difficult property to achieve in a lab, but crucial to the pharmaceutical and agricultural market because biological organisms can react differently to optically different molecules.

Two people smiling in lab — Maolin Li (seated) and Huimin Zhao in the lab. Credit: Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI)

“Our research opens up fascinating possibilities for the future of pharmaceutical and agrochemical development,” says Dr Maolin Li, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“By integrating fluorine into organic molecules through a photoenzymatic process, we are not only enhancing the beneficial properties of these compounds but also doing so in a manner that’s more environmentally responsible.

“It’s thrilling to think about the potential applications of our work in creating more effective and sustainable products for everyday use.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/chemistry/fluorine-addition-pharmaceuticals/

For Science!

New feature spotted in brightest gamma-ray burst of all time

July 28, 2024 Evrim Yazgin

NASA’s Fermi Telescope has revealed new details about the brightest of all time gamma-ray burst which may help explain these extreme and mysterious cosmic events.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) usually last less than a second. They originate from the dense remains of a dead giant star’s core, called a neutron star. But what causes neutron stars to release huge amounts of energy in the form of gamma radiation is still a mystery.

A jet of particles moving at nearly light speed emerges from a massive star in this artist’s concept. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab.

In October 2022, astronomers detected the largest gamma-ray burst ever seen – GRB 221009A. It came from a supernova about 2.4 billion light years away. The event had an intensity at least 10 times greater than any other GRB detected. It was dubbed the BOAT, for brightest of all time.

Now, analysis of the data from that event has revealed the first emission line which can be confidently identified in 50 years of studying GRBs.

The new analysis is published in Science.

Emission lines are created when matter interacts with light. Energy from the light is absorbed and reemitted in ways characteristic to the chemical make up of the matter which is interacting with it.

When the light reaches Earth and is spread out like a rainbow in a spectrum, the absorption and emission lines appear. Emission lines appear as dimmer or even black lines in the spectrum, whereas emission lines are brighter features.

At higher energies, these features in the spectrum can reveal processes between subatomic particles such as matter and anti-matter annihilation which can produces gamma rays.

“While some previous studies have reported possible evidence for absorption and emission features in other GRBs, subsequent scrutiny revealed that all of these could just be statistical fluctuations,” says coauthor Om Sharan Salafia at the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics Brera Observatory in Milan. “What we see in the BOAT is different.”

The emission line appeared almost 5 minutes after the burst was detected. It lasted about 40 seconds.

It peaked at 12 million electron volts of energy – millions of times more energetic than light in the visible spectrum.

The astronomers believe the emission line was caused by the annihilation of electrons and their anti-matter counterparts, positrons. If their interpretation is correct, it means the particles would have to have been moving toward Earth at 99.9% the speed of light.

“After decades of studying these incredible cosmic explosions, we still don’t understand the details of how these jets work,” says Elizabeth Hays, Fermi project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in the US. “Finding clues like this remarkable emission line will help scientists investigate this extreme environment more deeply.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astronomy/brightest-gamma-ray-burst-new-details/

Nice Time: Jimmy Carter Lives To Defeat The Guinea Worm!

He may have eradicated only the second disease since smallpox!

MARCIE JONES JUL 27, 2024

Good news!

Read on Substack

Snippet:

TRIGGER WARNING: Contains disgusting descriptions of the nasty-ass Guinea Worm, though no photos. Do not Google the photos.

…

So this is very nice, former President Jimmy Carter — who is still alive and 99 years young, though in hospice — has succeeded in his decades-long goal to get Guinea Worm Disease cases down to zero before he dies. (Warning, the picture at that link is disgusting.) There have now been zero cases of Guinea Worm disease in the past three months, and there were only 14 last year. Extremely promising signs that maybe they are truly gone forever! If no more Guinea Worms burst through anybody’s flesh within the next nine months, then it’ll officially be the second disease eradicated by humanity after smallpox.

When the Carter Center started trying to take down big Guinea Worm back in 1988, more than 3.5 million people in Africa and India were suffering from it. And BOY WERE THEY SUFFERING, because while the worm won’t directly kill you, it is agonizing and SO RETCHINGLY GROSS. First, nasty-ass fucking worm larva gets into your guts through dirty drinking water. Then it grows in your stomach for a fucking year. And THEN, a fucking THREE-FOOT WORM POPS OUT OF YOUR SKIN which hurts like fucking hell, obviously. And there is no vaccine or cure, the only solution is to pull this FUCKING DISGUSTING WORM out of your fucking skin by winding it around a fucking STICK.

So it is not the glamorous kind of affliction that makes a good poster for a benefit concert or bake sale, or plays well on an ad with Sarah McLachlan playing in the background. But one fixed relatively simply, with clean drinking water. And so that is what sweet peanut-farming Jimmy worked at. His Carter Center partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and has been quietly toiling to eradicate many other un-glamorous diseases that no one in the year of our Lord 2024 should have to suffer from, including: poliomyelitis (a virus that paralyzes mostly children), mumps, rubella, lymphatic filariasis (aka elephantiasis, a roundworm transmitted by mosquitoes), cysticercosis (tapeworm infection), measles, river blindness, and yaws (a nasty spirochete bacteria that causes bursting lesions). (snip-More)

For science!

Genetics explains bizarre echidna and platypus stomachs

July 24, 2024 Imma Perfetto

Monotremes are weird animals. They’re famously the only mammals to lay eggs instead of live young.

But did you know that they also have bizarre stomachs more akin to some fish than other mammals?

Platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) and short-beaked echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus) gastric systems are abnormally small, and lack the glands for secreting enzymes and acidic juices.

A photograph of an echidna walking on the sand at a beach — Short-beaked echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus). Credit: Enguerrand Blanchy

Platypus even go without a pyloric sphincter – the ring of smooth muscle that acts like a valve to regulate the flow of partially digested food from the stomach to the small intestine. This makes it difficult to tell the different between the oesophagus and intestines!

Now, Australian researchers have pinpointed a single gene, the NK3 homeobox 2 (Nkx3.2), as the likely cause for all this weirdness. The gene probably became inactivated tens of millions of years ago in the most recent ancestor of modern monotremes.

“Work from our lab previously had shown that the platypus and echidna had lost the genetic instructions for proteins that break down food and secrete stomach acids, but to me this didn’t explain the drastic shift in their stomach anatomy relative to other animals,” says Jackson Dann, a PhD student at the University of Adelaide and lead author of a new study detailing the discovery in the journal Open Biology.

“Thanks to novel repositories of genetic data, and physical specimens we had at the lab, we were able to discover that Nkx3.2 wasn’t functional in monotremes and that this inactivating event contributed to the evolution of their unique body plans.”

Apart from monotremes, only some aquatic and semi-aquatic fishes have lost their stomachs over the course of their evolutionary past.

The Australian ghostshark (Callorhinchus milii), Japanese puffer (Takifugu rubripes), zebrafish (Danio rerio), and Japanese rice fish (Oryzias latipes) all lack the same hydrochloric acid and gastric enzyme genes as seen in monotremes.

Photograph of a strange fish with a long, elephant-like protruding nose. — Australian ghost fish (*Callorhinchus milii*). Credit: Hannah Smith (CC BY-NC 4.0)

“It’s likely there is some overarching ecological factor we’re missing as to why these species have lost their stomach,” says Dann.

“It’s otherwise surprising that we would see these drastic shifts in stomach anatomy in monotremes and then the next closely related species are loose groups of fish.”

Dann and co-authors suggest that if this was a trait associated with aquatic and semi-aquatic organisms, their evidence would support a semi-aquatic ancestor of the short-beaked echidna and platypus.

Subsequent adaptations to the echidna lineage would have then allowed them to become specialised for terrestrial environments.

According to Dann, the more we know about monotremes, the more we can appreciate their role in their ecosystems and celebrate their eccentricities.

He highlights ecology endeavours like Echidn a CSI, which is an Australia-wide citizen science project helping conserve wild echidnas.

“A better understanding of these unique and iconic species provides a significant contribution to Australian ecology and culture, they help us understand more about mammals, including ourselves,” says Dann.

Originally published by Cosmos as Genetics explains bizarre echidna and platypus stomachs

https://cosmosmagazine.com/nature/evolution/genetics-explains-bizarre-echidna-and-platypus-stomachs/

More Sec. Buttigieg

A new microcontinent-

I think it’s exciting news!

New microcontinent being born between Canada and Greenland

July 18, 2024 Evrim Yazgin

An incompletely rifted and submerged microcontinent has been recognised tens of millions of years after the tectonic shifts which birthed it began.

Understanding how microcontinents are born may help in disaster prevention during earthquakes.

Ice covered fjord on Baffin Island with Davis Strait in the background. Credit: Image Makers / Photographer’s Choice RF / Getty Images Plus.

The newly recognised microcontinent exists on a tectonic plate boundary between Canada and Greenland which has formed the Davis Strait. This strait connects the Labrador Sea and Baffin Bay.

Scientists have identified a 19–24-kilometre-thick fragment of continental crust about 400km long in the ocean off the west coast of Greenland which has been dubbed the Davis Strait proto-microcontinent.

A study into the microcontinent’s formation is published in Gondwana Research.

The geologists created a reconstruction of the plate tectonic movements spanning roughly 30 million years which led to the proto-microcontinent’s formation.

Proto-microcontinents are defined by the authors as “related regions of relatively thick continental lithosphere separated from major continents by a zone of thinner continental lithosphere.” Lithosphere simply refers to the hard, rocky outer shell of our planet.

They rule out the formation being another feature on the crust, such as a continental ribbon.

View of greenland country, in the artic with the atlantic ocean and artic ocean — Credit: Ianm35 / iStock / Getty Images Plus.

Initial rifting between Canada and Greenland began about 118 million years ago. Seafloor spreading began about 61 million years ago, stopping roughly 33 million years ago to create the Davis Strait.

Between about 58 and 49 million years ago, the scientists say the seafloor spreading between Canada and Greenland shifted from northeast-southwest to north-south. This cleaved off the Davis Strait proto-microcontinent. This seafloor spreading stopped when Greenland collided with Ellesmere Island to the north.

Colour coded map of greenland and canada — Crustal thickness inversion overlain with proposed extent of the Davis Strait proto-microcontinent. Credit: L. Longley et al / Gondwana Research.

The research can be used to understand how other microcontinents are formed around the world, including the Jan Mayen microcontinent northeast of Iceland, the East Tasman rise southeast of Tasmania and the Gulden Draak Knoll off the coast of Western Australia.

“Better knowledge of how these microcontinents form allows researchers to understand how plate tectonics operates on Earth, with useful implications for the mitigation of plate tectonic hazards and discovering new resources,” says co-author Dr Jordan Phethean from the University of Derby, UK in an article on Phys.org.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/earth/earth-sciences/greenland-canada-microcontinent/