Danger Dust

A new research study highlights the significant health risks associated with dust storms, revealing an increase in emergency department (ED) visits for respiratory and cardiovascular conditions, as well as motor vehicle accidents, in three Southwestern U.S. states.

Dust storms are expected to become more frequent due to climate change, so it's crucial that we understand their immediate and long-term health impacts.

A new study, published in The Lancet Public Health, reveals that the food we eat, physical inactivity and obesity are largely to blame, as well as the COVID pandemic.

Of all the countries studied, England experienced the biggest slowdown in life expectancy.

It means that rather than looking forward to living longer than our parents or grandparents, we may find that we are dying sooner.

Countries studied included Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.

We often forget how wonderful it is that life exists, and what a special and unique phenomenon it is. As far as we know, ours is the only planet capable of supporting life, and it seems to have arisen in the form of something like today’s single-celled prokaryotic organisms.

However, scientists have not given up hope of finding what they call LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor, the ancestral cell from which all living things we know are descended) beyond the confines of our planet.

Martians in your stomach

In the 1980s, two Australian doctors, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, began studying gastroduodenal ulcers. Until then, the condition had been attributed to stress or excess gastric acid secretion, which did little to help cure the condition.

In 2005, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastric diseases, a discovery that revolutionised the field of gastroenterology.

https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/library-and-publications/library/blog/phossy-jaw-and-the-matchgirls/

Poisoning

Operations on a construction site can produce extremely fine dust particles invisible to the eye. These particles can clog the lungs and may also cause poisoning, depending on the material.

Lead paint, for example, can be a factor in older homes. About 87 percent of homes built before 1940 are likely to have at least some lead paint. This is also true of an estimated 24 percent of homes built between 1960 and 1978. Lead in the dust and debris can cause anemia and damage the brain and nervous system.

Consider the examples of siding contractors cutting cementitious cladding materials for 8 hours a day, five days a week. Or trades that work with tile or granite countertops, as well as those cutting clay roof tiles or concrete slabs.

All of them, and others in similar roles, are at risk, including others working nearby, as silica dust can remain airborne for hours, posing risks even after the immediate task is completed.

Moreover, the development of silicosis can take years, particularly with chronic silicosis, which typically arises after a decade or more of low-level silica exposure. Inhalation of these small crystalline particles can lead to multiple health conditions, including the incurable lung disease silicosis, lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and kidney disease.

Key Points

• Mineral dust concentrations from the MERRA-2 atmospheric reanalysis product are investigated at Hawaii's ocean Station ALOHA back to 1980

• Two semi-annual dust pulses at the site are described and little evidence is seen for long-term shifts in total dust or pulse timing

• Dust concentrations exhibit different periodicities and relationships with precipitation and Pacific Decadal Oscillation index

Plain Language Summary

Dust blown from Earth's continents fertilizes the oceans with iron and other nutrients needed for plants to grow. This affects ocean ecosystems and is an important control on Earth's climate. Modern models for the atmosphere report dust very precisely in time and space but rarely address how it affects specific ocean sites over time. We examine these best-available model outputs for a well-studied site at Hawaii to improve our understanding of how dust has varied over the many decades this region has been studied by oceanographic and atmospheric researchers.

Exposure to air pollution is associated with around seven million premature deaths per year across the world. When we think of urban air pollution, diesel exhaust emissions are often portrayed as a key culprit – rightly so, given previous research findings. However, our latest research shows that dust from brake pads could be more harmful to our lungs.

A new test developed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign can predict the performance of a new type of cementitious construction material in five minutes—a significant improvement over the current industry standard method, which takes seven or more days to complete. This development is poised to advance the use of next-generation resources called supplementary cementitious materials—or SCMs—by speeding up the quality-check process before leaving the production floor.

Due to declining coal production, traditional SCMs like coal-based fly ashes are in short supply. One promising alternative is newer SCMs like calcined clays, which can partially replace ordinary Portland cement and result in durable, low-cost concrete that produces less carbon dioxide during production.

Reduced requirements

Policy announcements from the current government have cemented this shift. They include the removal of the need for English and maths qualifications for adult apprentices, and the reduced minimum time period for an apprenticeship from 12 months to eight.

Three Rs requirement for apprentices scrapped

Basic education requirements for apprenticeships are being scrapped in a bid to boost uptake.

Apprentices will no longer be required to complete a level 2 English and maths qualification (equivalent to GCSE) in order to qualify.

The minimum duration of an apprenticeship is also being be reduced to eight months, down from the current minimum of 12 months.

https://www.theconstructionindex.co.uk/news/view/three-rs-requirement-for-apprentices-scrapped

Even as the country chases its goal of eliminating tuberculosis (TB), a particular complexity — silico-TB, a condition when patients suffer from both TB and silicosis or lung scarring because of exposure to silica dust — is posing challenges. A new study that tracked 137 silico-tuberculosis and 2,605 TB-only patients in Gujarat’s Khambhat found that the former group’s chances of survival was 2.75 times lesser than those suffering from just TB.

Invisible, omnipresent "forever chemicals" have been linked to a wide range of serious effects on human health, prompting growing calls for them to be banned.

While there is firm evidence that at least one of the more than 4,000 human-made chemicals called PFAS causes cancer, researchers are still attempting to fully understand their broader health impacts.

Other linked diseases

More broadly, observational studies have suggested that exposure to PFAS chemicals is associated with increased rates of cancer, obesity, thyroid, liver and kidney disease, higher cholesterol, low birthweight, infertility and even weaker responses to vaccines.

Managers of a chemical plant accused of knowingly contaminating the water of hundreds of thousands of people are on trial in Italy, in one of Europe's biggest environmental disaster lawsuits.

The now-shuttered Miteni factory near the northeastern city of Vicenza is alleged to have polluted one of Europe's largest groundwater basins with PFAS, dubbed "forever chemicals" because they never break down.

Pesticides affect a diverse range of non-target species and may be linked to global biodiversity loss. The magnitude of this hazard remains only partially understood.

We present a synthesis of pesticide (insecticide, herbicide and fungicide) impacts on multiple non-target organisms across trophic levels based on 20,212 effect sizes from 1,705 studies.

For non-target plants, animals (invertebrate and vertebrates) and microorganisms (bacteria and fungi), we show negative responses of the growth, reproduction, behaviour and other physiological biomarkers within terrestrial and aquatic systems.

Pesticides formulated for specific taxa negatively affected non-target groups, e.g. insecticidal neonicotinoids affecting amphibians. Negative effects were more pronounced in temperate than tropical regions but were consistent between aquatic and terrestrial environments, even after correcting for field-realistic terrestrial and environmentally relevant exposure scenarios.

Our results question the sustainability of current pesticide use and support the need for enhanced risk assessments to reduce risks to biodiversity and ecosystems.

A team of researchers from the Sant Pau Research Institute (IR Sant Pau) has published a study in the Journal of Neuroinflammation that, for the first time, examines in depth the role of the peripheral immune system in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) at the single-cell level.

Their findings suggest that immune system cells—particularly two subpopulations of natural killer (NK) cells—may play a crucial part in the development and progression of this neurodegenerative disease.

ALS is a condition that causes the progressive degeneration of motor neurons, leading to a loss of muscle function and, eventually, affecting vital functions such as breathing.

Thursday, 13 February 2025, 10:23 am

Press Release: New Zealand Government

"I’m keen to hear from all industries in which respirable crystalline silica is generated including/such as mining, quarrying, tunnelling, roading, foundries, construction, manufacturing of concrete, bricks and tiles, abrasive blasting, monumental masonry work, concrete drilling, grinding, fettling, mixing, handling and dry shovelling,” says Ms van Velden.

“You still have time to make a submission by going to MBIE’s website. The consultation closes at 5pm on 18 March 2025.”

Lung cancer cases are increasing in people who have never smoked, especially in women, a new study by the World Health Organization’s cancer agency has found.

The findings, published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, reveal that lung adenocarcinoma, the most common type of lung cancer among non-smokers, accounts for nearly 60% of lung cancer cases in women compared to 45% in men.

About 2.5 million new lung cancer cases were diagnosed worldwide in 2022 – an increase of 300,000 since 2020. The study suggests that environmental factors, particularly air pollution, along with genetic predisposition and immune responses, may be driving this rise in non-smoking-related lung cancer.

Like the stent I mentioned earlier, 4D printing raises the possibility of creating implants and prosthetics that adapt to patients’ needs in real time. Research teams working on these innovations include the Biomet4D project, coordinated by the IMDEA Materials Institute in Madrid, which is developing smart, biodegradable metallic implants for people with seriously damaged or defective bones. The implants can change shape and expand as the bone grows, supporting it much more effectively than a static implant.

Another area of focus is smarter ways to give patients drugs. For example, a team of researchers based at China’s Jilin University have created 4D-printed hydrogel capsules whose outer structure stays intact inside a patient’s body until it reaches a particular temperature, such as when there is an infection, meaning the drug only takes effect when it’s required. This could be useful in situations where it’s beneficial to release a drug into a patient’s body at exactly the right time and location.

We’re also developing materials for boat fenders and car bumpers whose shape can be restored by adding heat, as a way of removing dents, as well as shape-adaptive finger splints for broken bones, and self-assembling, extra-comfortable furniture.

So, the next time you marvel at the capabilities of 3D printing, remember: the future lies in 4D printing, where materials come alive and redefine the possibilities of tomorrow.

Everyone loves a breath of fresh air. Unfortunately, too often our air is anything but fresh.

While air quality varies dramatically from place to place and day to day, nearly the entire world—about 99% of the global population—is exposed to air at some point that doesn't meet the strict standards set by the World Health Organization. Polluted air, laden with noxious gasses or tiny, invisible particles that burrow into human bodies, kills 7 million people prematurely every year, the U.N. health agency estimates.

And for the millions living in some of the world's smoggiest cities—many of them in Asia like New Delhi; Dhaka, Bangladesh; Bangkok; and Jakarta, Indonesia—bad air might seem inescapable.

But there are things that people can do, starting with understanding that the air isn't only polluted when it looks smoggy.

WTF!

Mercury is a highly toxic trace metal that readily biomagnifies in food webs where it is inaccessible to current bioremediation methods.

Animals could potentially be engineered to detoxify mercury within their food webs to clean up impacted ecosystems. We demonstrate that invertebrate (Drosophila melanogaster) and vertebrate (Danio rerio) animal models can express organomercurial lyase (MerB) and mercuric reductase (MerA) from Escherichia coli to demethylate methylmercury and remove it from their biomass as volatile elemental mercury.

The engineered animals accumulated less than half as much mercury relative to their wild-type counterparts, and a higher proportion of mercury in their tissue was in the form of less bioavailable inorganic mercury.

Furthermore, the engineered animals could tolerate higher exposures to methylmercury compared to controls.

These findings demonstrate the potential of using engineered animals for bioremediation and may be applied to reduce the burden of methylmercury in impacted ecosystems by disrupting its biomagnification or to treat contaminated organic waste streams.

Hamilton walked around with a pen and pad in hand, listening.

One man told her about a young immigrant from Bulgaria who’d been working here but had seemed to go crazy a few weeks earlier; the worker was removed from the plant in a straitjacket and later died.

She heard of another man, also an immigrant, who was put to work making paste for batteries and had a habit of moistening his fingers on his tongue. He lasted ten days before he went home ill.

One foreman told Hamilton that few of his men could work for more than a few weeks before they called in sick. Almost all had suffered the same symptoms, starting with hallucinations.

The boss offered no payment for sick workers, and he didn’t appear to be making much effort to prevent them from getting sick. “Many times …

I met men who employed foreign-born labor because it was cheap and submissive, and then washed their hands of all responsibility,” she wrote. “They deliberately chose such men because it meant … a surplus of eager, undemanding labor.”

Key takeaways:

• Silica exposure was linked to overlap myositis and myositis with lung disease symptoms, while smoking further increased risk.

• Myositis with lung disease symptoms was also associated with moderate-to-high heavy metals, solvents exposure.

Exposures to silica dust, solvents or heavy metals increase the likelihood of developing various forms of myositis, especially more severe forms involving the lungs.

“The findings of this study suggest that exposure to certain chemicals through occupation or hobbies — shown to be a risk factor for systemic, autoimmune rheumatic diseases — may also be associated with specific clinical subgroups of disease, particularly those associated with lung disease,” Rider said. “In addition to the interaction with smoking, we saw some evidence that risk may increase as one is exposed to more of these factors.”

While blood clots usually form to stop a wound from bleeding, cancer patients can form clots without injury, plugging up vessels and cutting off circulation to organs. The study, published in Cell, shows that tumors drive clot formation (thrombosis) by releasing chemokines, secreted proteins which then circulate to the lung. Once there, the chemokines prompt immune cells called macrophages to release small vesicles that attach to cell fragments (platelets), forming life-threatening clots.

Microplastics can move through mice brains and block blood vessels, essentially mimicking blood clots that could potentially be fatal or otherwise disrupt brain function.

The findings are detailed in a peer-reviewed paper for which researchers for the first time used real-time imaging to track bits of plastic as they moved through and accumulated in brain blood vessels. When one piece of plastic got stuck, others accumulated behind it, like a “car crash”, the authors reported.

The authors then found decreased motor function in those mice exposed to microplastics, suggesting impacts on the brain. While mounting evidence has linked microplastics to neurotoxicity, the research is the first to suggest how – it probably reduces blood flow.

His studies on the heart combined both experimentation and observation. Using an ox’s heart to understand blood flow though the aortic valves, Leonardo poured molten wax into the surrounding cavities to make a wax cast, from which a glass model of the heart was made. He then pumped water mixed with grass seeds through this model to visualise the flow pattern. From this experiment, he concluded that the vortex-like flow of blood through the aortic valves was responsible for closing them during each heartbeat.

Where he got things wrong, Leonardo’s shifting focus may also have played a part. His restlessness, disorganised notes and unfinished work suggest ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). Equally, this may also explain his boundless curiosity and incredible creativity.

Despite his shortcomings, Leonardo’s anatomical studies were centuries ahead of their time, rivalling modern standards.