Scientists Are Turning Mosquitoes “Trans” So They Can Fight Malaria

New LGBTQ+ insect just dropped. (From A: But is this really trans?)

By Abby Monteil October 8, 2024

From gay polyamorous flamingos to a “half-male, half-female bird” sighting, Mother Nature has proven that she’s pretty damn queer. But sometimes, scientists like to get in on the fun, too. It turns out that some are even using their talents to engineer “trans” mosquitoes (yes, really).

On October 5, the X account @Rainmaker1973 shared a video of a female mosquito attempting to bite a human hand. However, its blood-sucking attempts are thwarted because its proboscis — aka its needle-like mouth — could not break through the skin.

“Using the CRISPR technique, it’s possible to genetically modify mosquitoes by disabling a gene in females, so that their proboscis turns male, making them unable to pierce human skin,” @Rainmaker1973 explained.

https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1842601255220465690

Before we go further, a quick science lesson: According to the National Human Genome Research Institute, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR, is a technology that allows scientists to selectively modify DNA.

So why use this technology on mosquitoes? Well, malaria, which kills more than 600,000 people per year, is transmitted to humans by female mosquitoes belonging to the genus Anopheles, which, per the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, encompasses between 30 and 40 mosquito species. According to a 2018 study in the journal Nature Biotechnology, using CRISPR technology on female mosquitoes resulted in egg production reaching the point of “total population collapse” within 7 to 11 generations. In other words, this technique allows scientists to not only ensure that female mosquitoes carrying malaria can’t spread the disease to humans, but that they can’t reproduce in general. This CRISPR-enabled gene editing is just one of several techniques that researchers have used to fight the spread of malaria in humans.

So, sure, in a manner of speaking, scientists are doing their best to curb the spread of malaria by making some mosquitoes “trans.” In addition to being a genetic achievement, @Rainmaker1973’s viral video sharing the news also unsurprisingly inspired some excellent tweets. (see on the page)

She strokin tryna wake it up OMG… hrt no joke,” one X user tweeted.

“Mosquitoes pissing me off so I took out my crispr and gave them gender dysphoria,” another joked.

The past few years have introduced no shortage of queer bugs, from fruit flies who were potentially turned gay by air pollution to cicadas who became hypersexual zombies after being infected with a sexually transmitted fungus. What’s a few more trans mosquitoes?

https://www.them.us/story/mosquitoes-trans-crispr-gene-editing

Space-made next-gen optic fibres touch back down to Earth

October 8, 2024 Imma Perfetto

Next-generation optical fibre manufactured in microgravity aboard the International Space Station has been returned safely to Earth.

Scientists at Adelaide University in South Australia are now comparing the fibres to otherwise identical Earth-made counterparts to confirm whether the space-made product is superior.

It’s thought likely that it is, but the results won’t be known for a couple of months.

The research has already delivered some interesting results: “Seven of the draws went beyond 700 meters, showcasing that it is possible to produce commercial lengths of fibre in space,” says Rob Loughan, CEO of the company that designed the fibre drawing device, Flawless Photonics.

“The longest draw went above 1,141 meters, setting a record for the longest fibre manufactured in space.”

A photograph of a thin glass fibre wound around a drum — ZBLAN glass fibre. Credit: Imma Perfetto

The fibres were made of ZBLAN glass, a substance which has the potential to transmit light 20 times further than traditional silica-based fibre-optic cables.

In an optical fibre, light becomes dimmer and dimmer as it travels along the fibre. Therefore, for example, submarine fibre optics cables require amplifiers about every 100km to boost the light signal to allow it to be transmitted over long distances.

A ZBLAN optical fibre could increase distances between amplifiers, from every 100 km for silica fibres to every 2,000 km.

But this isn’t feasible yet. In practice, ZBLAN fibres perform about 10 times worse than the best silica fibres because the fabrication process introduces defects and impurities, which lower its efficiency at transmitting light.

Professor Heike Ebendorff-Heidepriem, and her team at the University of Adelaide’s Australian National Fabrication Facility’s (ANFF) are trying to solve the problem of enhanced impurities and defects in current ZBLAN glass fibres.

A photograpjh of 3 young men and a woman standing in front of a tall tower-like piece of equipment inside of a lab — Dr Yunle Wei, Alson Ng, Professor Heike Ebendorff-Heidepriem, and Dr Ka Wu with the team’s 4m draw tower. Credit: Imma Perfetto

“The purity of the glass depends on the purity of the raw material, and it is challenging to make highly pure solid raw materials,” says Ebendorff-Heidepriem. The team is trying to completely remove one of the main reasons the defects form: gravity.

“Gravity here on Earth causes convection … If you heat up something on a hot plate, the liquid is hot at the bottom. That makes the density of the liquid at the bottom become lower, which moves this portion of the liquid up, at the top the liquid becomes cooler, making the density higher, therefore gravity pulls it down, and so on” she explains.

Ebendorff-Heidepriem partnered with Flawless Photonics which designed and operates a fibre drawing device that squeezed all the necessary technology into a 0.8m-long box for the ISS.

In June, the more than 11km of fibre returned to Earth, intact. Now, work is underway at the University of Adelaide and at 5 other organisations around the world to determine how much of an impact gravity has on ZBLAN’s ability to transmit light. They are hoping to complete their analysis by December this year.

“We will see: is it better? Is it worse? Is it the same? And no matter what result we get, I think the biggest outcome is already achieved – we can make commercial lengths of optical fibres in space.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/materials/space-fibres-down-to-earth/

Danged Ants! 😏

Catastrophe might have created the first ant farms

October 4, 2024 Ariel Marcy

When an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, it caused a mass extinction. Now researchers have evidence that this catastrophe ushered in the invention of agriculture by ants.

“Extinction events can be huge disasters for most organisms, but it can actually be positive for others,” says Ted Schultz, curator of ants at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and senior author of the paper. “At the end of the Cretaceous, dinosaurs did not do very well, but fungi experienced a heyday.”

What’s the link between fungi and ants?

Close up of a worker ant on top of a fungus farm — A worker ant of a fungus-farming species in Brazil. Credit: Don Parsons

The researchers propose this anti-culture heyday began with a cataclysmic collision that filled the atmosphere with debris and blocked out the sun, halting photosynthesis for years. As plants died en masse, they littered the ground with organic matter.

Fungi proliferated and ants ate the fungi for food. Some ants continued to eat fungi after Earth’s ecosystems rebounded and today more than 250 ant species have adapted and actively create conditions for fungus to thrive.

“Ants have been practicing agriculture and fungus farming for much longer than humans have existed,” says Schultz.

To pinpoint when this symbiotic interaction began, Schultz and colleagues amassed the largest genetic dataset of fungus-farming ants.

They also analysed the genetics of hundreds of fungi species, including those that are farmed by ants and their wild relatives.

Next, the team assembled evolutionary trees for both ants and fungi which revealed that farming ants and their fungus crops have been intertwined for 66 million years.

The data also revealed that “higher” forms of agriculture, where ants and fungi are completely reliant on one another, evolved around 27 million years ago. This coincided with a rapid global cooling event that fractured tropical environments. These changes led to ants cultivating a fungus outside its natural habitat.

“The ants domesticated these fungi in the same way that humans domesticated crops,” says Schultz. “What’s extraordinary is now we can date when the higher ants originally cultivated the higher fungi.”

Like humans, ant agriculturists have dealt with familiar challenges including the problems with monoculture and the trade-offs of selecting for higher food yields.

“We could probably learn something from the agricultural success of these ants over the past 66 million years,” says Schultz.

For Science on Wed.

Some sloths among animals unable to adapt to rapid climate change

A new study warns that sloths living in high-altitude rainforests of South and Central America could face extinction if temperatures there continue to rise according to climatic predictions.

The research, published in PeerJ Life & Environment, suggests that some sloths’ restricted ability to migrate to cooler regions and limited metabolic flexibility make them particularly vulnerable to climate change.

“Sloths are inherently limited by their slow metabolism and unique inability to regulate body temperature effectively, unlike most mammals,” says Dr Rebecca Cliffe, lead researcher of the study from Swansea University and The Sloth Conservation Foundation in the UK.

“Our research shows that sloths, particularly in high-altitude regions, may not be able to survive the significant increases in temperature forecast for 2100.” (snip-MORE)

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Structure of important male contraceptive target finally solved

A team at Monash University in Victoria developing a hormone-free, reversible male contraceptive has now figured out the 3D structure of one of their primary therapeutic targets – the P2X1-purinergic receptor (P2X1).

According to Dr Sab Ventura from the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (MIPS), this has been the main stumbling block that has so far hindered the team from progressing the drug discovery program to the next stage.

“Our primary goal is to develop a male contraceptive pill that is not only hormone-free but also bypasses side effects such as long-term irreversible impacts on fertility, making it suitable for young men seeking contraceptive options,” says Ventura.

In previous research in mice, the team showed that simultaneous inactivation of P2X1 and a second protein, α1A-adrenergic receptor, resulted in male infertility.

“Now we know what our therapeutic target looks like, we can generate drugs that can bind to it appropriately, which totally changes the game,” says Ventura. (snip-MORE)

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River piracy pushing Mount Everest upwards

Mount Everest is tall. In other news, the sky is blue.

But Everest (also called Chomolungma and Sagarmāthā) is taller than it logically should be – towering 238m above the world’s next highest peak, K2, and more than 250m higher than any of its counterparts in the relatively uniform Himalaya range.

Plus, it’s growing at about 2mm a year, faster than the expected rate for the range.

A team of Chinese and UK scientists have now suggested why this is the case.

The researchers think the culprit is a nearby river which “captured” another river 89,000 years ago, causing erosion that made Everest more buoyant.

They’ve published their findings in Nature Geoscience.

The Himalayan peaks get their extraordinary height from the collision of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates, causing the Earth’s crust to thicken and the mountain range to push upwards.

“An interesting river system exists in the Everest region,” says co-author Dr Jin-Gen Dai, from China University of Geosciences.

The team used numerical modelling to see how the river changed over time. They found that, about 89,000 years ago, the Arun river “captured” another nearby river.

This event, referred to as “river piracy”, happens when a river diverts its course and takes up the discharge of another river or stream.

“Our research shows that as the nearby river system cuts deeper, the loss of material is causing the mountain to spring further upwards,” says co-author Adam Smith, a PhD student at University College London, UK.

The team estimates that the river piracy has made Everest between 15 and 50m higher than it would otherwise be.

It’s also made neighbouring peaks, Lhotse and Makalu, unusually tall. These are the 4th and 5th highest mountains in the world, respectively. (snip-MORE)

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Science fiction health technology a step closer

It’s not the famous Star Trek tricorder but it’s close: researchers have developed a hand-held scanner that can generate highly detailed 3D images of body parts in almost real time.

The technology can accurately image blood vessels up to 15mm deep in human tissue, which the researchers say could help to diagnose conditions such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and arthritis.

“We’ve come a long way with photoacoustic imaging in recent years, but there were still barriers to using it in the clinic,” says Paul Beard of University College London (UCL), UK, corresponding author of the new Nature Biomedical Engineering paper.

“The breakthrough in this study is the acceleration in the time it takes to acquire images, which is between 100 and 1,000 times faster than previous scanners.

“This speed avoids motion-induced blurring, providing highly detailed images of a quality that no other scanner can provide. It also means that rather than taking 5 minutes or longer, images can be acquired in real time, making it possible to visualise dynamic physiological events.

“These technical advances make the system suitable for clinical use for the first time, allowing us to look at aspects of human biology and disease that we haven’t been able to before.” (snip-MORE)

2 For Science, on Monday

Each of these struck my fancy, so I’m sharing.

Could we hit the “pause button” on human embryo development?

September 27, 2024 Imma Perfetto

The mechanisms that allow some mammals to pause the development of their young inside the womb also seem work in human cells, according to a fascinating new study published in the journal Cell.

Biologists discovered they could induce a dormant state in human cells by decreasing the activity of the mTOR signaling pathway, which they previously showed is a major regulator of this process in mice.

They triggered this dormant state not in human embryos, but in human pluripotent stem cells and stem-cell based models known as blastoids, which mimic the blastocyst stage of embryonic development at about 5 days post-fertilisation. (snip)

Until now it was unclear whether diapause could be triggered in humans.

“The mTOR pathway is a major regulator of growth and developmental progression in mouse embryos,” says co-senior author Aydan Bulut-Karslioglu of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Germany.

“When we treated human stem cells and blastoids with an mTOR inhibitor we observed a developmental delay, which means that human cells can deploy the molecular machinery to elicit a diapause-like response.”

Cells in this dormant state show reduced cell division, slower development and a decreased ability to attach to the uterine lining. The ability to enter this dormant stage seems to be restricted to the blastocyst stage of development. (snip-MORE)

Explosive energy-dense material made from air (with plasma)

September 29, 2024 Ellen Phiddian

Chemists have made an extremely energy-dense, environmentally friendly fuel out of nitrogen.

They’ve done it by employing one of chemistry’s favourite hobbies, bullying nitrogen n (N₂₎ into weird structures. An explosion occurred, but it was a small one.

The Chinese team has successfully made the element adopt a diamond-like structure, called cubic gauche nitrogen (cg-N) and importantly made it without extremely high pressures. In fact, they managed it at standard atmospheric pressure.

They’ve published their triumph in Science Advances.

Pure nitrogen-based molecules have drawn interest from chemists because they can release a tremendous amount of energy when they decompose. (snip-MORE)

Astronomy Picture of the Day

First, peace to all, and make it a good International Day of Peace. Next, the Autumnal/Spring Equinox is tomorrow morning at 7:44 AM USCDT/whatever time it is where you are. Here’s a beautifully peaceful photo from NASA’s Photo of the Day:

2024 September 21

Sunrise Shadows in the Sky
Image Credit & Copyright: Emili Vilamala

Explanation: The defining astronomical moment of this September’s equinox is at 12:44 UTC on September 22, when the Sun crosses the celestial equator moving south in its yearly journey through planet Earth’s sky. That marks the beginning of fall for our fair planet in the northern hemisphere and spring in the southern hemisphere, when day and night are nearly equal around the globe. Of course, if you celebrate the astronomical change of seasons by watching a sunrise you can also look for crepuscular rays. Outlined by shadows cast by clouds, crepuscular rays can have a dramatic appearance in the twilight sky during any sunrise (or sunset). Due to perspective, the parallel cloud shadows will seem to point back to the rising Sun and a place due east on your horizon on the equinox date. But in this spectacular sunrise skyscape captured in early June, the parallel shadows and crepuscular rays appear to converge toward an eastern horizon’s more northerly sunrise. The well-composed photo places the rising Sun just behind the bell tower of a church in the town of Vic, province of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

Tomorrow’s picture: Equinox in the City

“Scuba-diving” lizards use bubble to breathe underwater

I thought this would be cute to post for a science article, and now that I’m getting it done, I’m thinking Scottie posted video about these little guys, a few months or so back. I hope this isn’t a boring duplicate. Earlier it didn’t hit me, but now at bedtime, the photo is ringing a vague bell. Still, it’s really cute for a Friday morning, so enjoy the side eye from the anole being called a chicken nugget.

September 18, 2024, Ariel Marcy

Researchers have found a type of lizard – referred to as the chicken nugget of the forest – that can hide underwater thanks to a special bubble they produce around their nostrils.

Details of the scuba-diving lizards are published in Biology Letters.

Image of blue-gray lizard standing underwater with large bubble emerging from its nostrils. — A water anole produces a special bubble over its nostrils to breathe underwater. Credit: Lindsey Swierk.

For animals that have adapted to live on land, air-based breathing limits the amount of time they can survive underwater.

Many invertebrates, including species of beetles and spiders, are known to use bubbles of air to extend the amount of time they can spend underwater. These bubbles allow air-breathing animals to inhale previously exhaled air and take in additional oxygen. This behaviour is called rebreathing, inspired by the scuba technology of the same name.

Until recently, there were no known examples of vertebrates using bubbles to rebreathe underwater. In 2021, Lindsey Swierk, an assistant research professor at Binghamton University in New York in the USA, and her colleagues documented rebreathing in several species of Anolis lizards.

One such species, the water anole (Anolis aquaticus), is a semi-aquatic lizard that lives near streams in the forests of southern Costa Rica.

“Anoles are kind of like the chicken nuggets of the forest. Birds eat them, snakes eat them. So, by jumping in the water, they can escape a lot of their predators,” says Swierk. “We know that they can stay underwater at least about 20 minutes, but probably longer.”

The question remains whether the bubble over the water anole’s nostril functionally extended the amount of time these lizards could hide underwater.

To test this, Swierk and coauthors applied a bubble-impairing substance to the skin of one group of lizards.

“Lizard skin is hydrophobic. Typically, that allows air to stick very tightly to the skin and permits this bubble to form,” said Swierk. “But when you cover the skin with an emollient, air no longer sticks to the skin surface, so the bubbles can’t form.”

Swierk’s team then measured how long the control group stayed underwater compared to the bubble-impaired group. They found that the control group stayed underwater 32% longer on average.

“This is significant because this is the first experiment that truly shows adaptive significance of bubbles. Rebreathing bubbles allow lizards to stay underwater longer. Before, we suspected it – we saw a pattern – but we didn’t actually test if it served a functional role.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/nature/animals/scuba-diving-lizards-breathe-bubble/

Van Gogh painting mirrors real atmospheric physics

September 18, 2024 Ellen Phiddian

(One of the teachers with whom I worked had a beautiful tattoo of this painting on her inner wrist. She said it gave her strength. I need to send this to her, as she tutors STEAM aside from classroom work, and this is her top favorite painting.)

Scientists have peered at Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night painting and discovered it displays a startling resemblance to real atmospheric turbulence.

To see stars, one needs clear skies. But just because we can’t see it, doesn’t mean there aren’t intricate patterns of air movement above us on a clear night.

A paper published in Physics of Fluids, suggests that van Gogh had an “intuitive” understanding of this while making his famous painting in 1889.

A Chinese and French team analysed the brush strokes in The Starry Night, aiming to see how similar they were to real atmospheric movements.

The masterpiece has been the subject of several atmospheric studies before, with contradictory conclusions, but the researchers say they’re the first to look at all of the painting’s whirls and eddies.

They looked at the 14 main swirls in the painting, and compared these with theories on energy and turbulent flows in the atmosphere.

“The scale of the paint strokes played a crucial role,” says author Associate Professor Yongxiang Huang, a researcher in fluid dynamics at Xiamen University, China.

“With a high-resolution digital picture, we were able to measure precisely the typical size of the brushstrokes and compare these to the scales expected from turbulence theories.”

Cropped and annotated sections of van gogh's the starry night — The authors measured the whirling brush strokes in van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” along with variances in brightness of the paint colours, to see how closely they reflected real atmospheric physics. There were several matches between the painting and fluid dynamics, suggesting van Gogh had an “intuitive” understanding of these concepts. Credit: Yinxiang Ma

As well as brush stroke size, the researchers also examined the “relative luminance” of paint colours used in the painting’s swirls.

They found that the picture aligned with a theory of turbulence called Kolmogorov’s Law, which predicts atmospheric movement based on measured inertia.

The changes in brightness reflect a process called Batchelor’s scaling, which describes how fluids diffuse at smaller scales.

“It reveals a deep and intuitive understanding of natural phenomena,” says Huang.

“Van Gogh’s precise representation of turbulence might be from studying the movement of clouds and the atmosphere or an innate sense of how to capture the dynamism of the sky.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/physics/van-gogh-starry-night-atmosphere/

Earth will have new “mini moon”, length of a bus, for 2 months

September 16, 2024 Evrim Yazgin Cosmos science journalist

An asteroid is approaching, but it won’t crash into Earth. Instead, it’ll be our planet’s little companion for 2 months before continuing on its merry way.

Asteroid approaching earth, computer artwork — Asteroid approaching Earth, computer artwork. Credit: SCIEPRO / Science Photo Library / Getty Images Plus.

2024 PT₅ is about 11m wide. The asteroid was discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope in South Africa on 7 August.

In a study published in the journal Research Notes of the AAS, a pair of asteroid dynamics researchers calculated the asteroid’s size, speed and path. The researchers determined the asteroid would complete a single orbit around Earth over 53 days before being flung back into outer space.

The asteroid will start its orbit of Earth on 29 September. The bus-sized “mini moon” is scheduled to depart on 25 November.

Many asteroids follow a similar journey, falling into partial or full elliptical orbits around our planet as they pass by. One such “quasi-moon” is an asteroid discovered last year which astronomers believe has been orbiting Earth for more than 2,000 years.

Other quasi-moons make much briefer visits, like the 5m 2006 RH₁₂₀ which orbited Earth for about a year and 2020 CD₃ which was a mini companion of our planet for several years before leaving us in May 2020.

The researchers also believe they know from where 2024 PT₅ is joining us based on its trajectory.

“Such orbital elements are consistent with those of the Arjunas, a sparsely resonant population of small NEOs [near-Earth objects] in a secondary asteroid belt found surrounding the path followed by the Earth–Moon system,” they write.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astronomy/mini-moon-asteroid-2-months/