Danger Dust

Climate change is fueling an alarming increase in deadly lightning strikes in India, killing nearly 1,900 people a year in the world's most populous country, scientists warn.

Lightning caused a staggering 101,309 deaths between 1967 and 2020, with a sharp increase between 2010 and 2020.

The results indicate a steady increase in lightning activity in India, positioning it as a major killer among climate change-induced natural disasters.

Lightning strikes are common in India during the June-September monsoon rains, which is crucial to replenishing regional water supplies.

Inspectors found employees laboring in a haze of dust throughout the workspace.

Federal safety inspectors became aware that a 31-year-old employee of a Chicago countertop manufacturer needed a double lung transplant after suffering accelerated silicosis, an incurable lung disease.

The U.S. Department of Labor immediately alerted the company of the potential imminent danger and an inspection by the department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration found workers exposed to silica levels up to six times greater than permissible limits. 

In addition, the agency identified 20 serious violations related to its lack of housekeeping, respirator deficiencies, lack of a silica exposure control plan or hazard communication program, not training employees in the use of compressed air and allowing its improper use.

DDT, a synthetic insecticide that belongs to the family of organic halogen compounds and is highly toxic toward a wide variety of insects as a contact poison that apparently exerts its effects by disorganizing the nervous system.

As a result of repeated sprayings, DDT accumulated in soils in surprisingly large amounts (10–112 kilograms per hectare [10–100 pounds per acre]). Its effects on wildlife greatly increased as it became associated with food chains. The stability of DDT led to its bioaccumulation in the bodily tissues of insects that constitute the diet of other animals higher up the food chain, with toxic effects on the latter. Songbirds and birds of prey, such as eagles, hawks, and falcons, were usually most severely affected, and serious declines in their populations have been traced to the effects of DDT. Use of DDT began to be restricted in the 1960s.

As humans alter the planet’s climate and ecosystems, scientists are looking to Earth’s history to help predict what may unfold from climate change. To this end, massive ice structures like glaciers serve as nature’s freezers, archiving detailed records of past climates and ecosystems – including viruses.

One key finding was that viral communities varied significantly between cold and warm climatic periods. The most distinct community of viral species on the glacier appeared about 11,500 years ago, coinciding with the major transition from the Last Glacial Stage to the Holocene. This suggests that the unique climate conditions during cold and warm periods profoundly influenced the composition of viral communities. We hypothesize that these influences were likely due to viruses from other places being blown in by changing wind patterns and subject to selection pressures from changing temperatures on the glacier.

‘Dulce’: How a sweet-smelling chemical upended life in Salinas, Puerto Rico

An industrial worker got one whiff of ethylene oxide. Twenty years later, he still hasn’t recovered — and his community is searching for answers.

On the day of his hospitalization, Morales and several coworkers had just removed a pallet of sterilized equipment from the chamber. Once the door to the chamber was closed, Morales and the others took off their gas masks, as was standard. Morales noticed that one vial of biological material was missing. He identified the box he’d overlooked and to be sure that it was sterilized, he opened it. 

One memory that has always remained vivid for Morales is what he smelled when he opened the box. “Dulce,” Morales said to describe the scent; it was sweet, unlike anything he’d smelled before. 

When they spoke after the accident, Steri-Tech founder and CEO Jorge Vivoni assured Morales that the plant was safe. According to Morales, Vivoni told him that his condition was the result of congenital epilepsy, not workplace exposure. But during his recovery, Morales decided to read about the effects of inhaling ethylene oxide and recognized that he had experienced all the symptoms of acute exposure: headaches, dizziness, twitchiness, and seizures. 

Research since Morales’ incident has shown that ethylene oxide can damage DNA structures — an ability that makes it both an effective sterilizer and a carcinogen. When it is inhaled by humans, it can irritate the respiratory pathways and increase the risk of cancer and negative health effects in unborn children. About 50 percent of the medical equipment in the U.S. and its territories is sterilized this way.

Right now, human population growth is doing something long thought impossible – it’s wavering. It’s now possible global population could peak much earlier than expected, topping 10 billion in the 2060s. Then, it would begin to fall.

In wealthier countries, it’s already happening. Japan’s population is falling sharply, with a net loss of 100 people every hour. In Europe, America and East Asia, fertility rates have fallen sharply. Many middle or lower income countries are about to drop too.

This is an extraordinary change. It was only ten years ago demographers were forecasting our numbers could reach as high as 12.3 billion, up from around 8 billion today.

For 50 years, some environmentalists have tried to save the environment by cutting global population growth. In 1968, The Population Bomb forecast massive famines and called for large-scale birth control.

The researchers revealed how genes in tumors edit themselves to escape the immune system's detection. The study identifies, for the first time, the actual genes that are silenced by tumors, offering a roadmap for better immunotherapies.

The team found that tumors use epigenetic modification, particularly DNA methylation, to suppress genes involved in the innate immune response—the body's first line of defense against pathogens and disease.

This silencing is how most tumors evade current immunotherapies, such as CAR-T cells and checkpoint inhibitors. However, the scientists also found that the FDA-approved drug decitabine, a chemotherapy that slows cancer cell growth, can reverse these gene edits.

"It Feels Impossible to Stay” : The U.S. Needs Wildland Firefighters More Than Ever, but the Federal Government Is Losing Them

For communities throughout the American West, wildland firefighters represent the last line of defense, but that line is fraying because the government decided long ago that they’re not worth very much. The highly trained men and women protecting communities from immolation earn the same base pay as a fast-food server while taking severe risks with their physical and mental health.

A cocktail of pollutants

Particulate matter, or PM2.5, have a diameter less than a 30th of the width of a human hair and can penetrate deep into our lungs easily. The smallest particles cross into the bloodstream and affect our health, and some have even been detected in the blood of unborn children.

They can come from natural sources such as volcanoes and deserts but are also produced by human activities such as industry, cars, agriculture, domestic burning, and fires arising from climate change.

PM2.5 has been linked to a very wide range of health issues ranging from breathing problems like asthma, to reduced lung health, increased likelihood of developing cancer and heart disease, and an increased risk of developing many diseases including diabetes, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's.

The World Health Organization recommends that the annual average concentration of PM2.5 should not exceed a concentration of 5 micrograms per cubic meter air (5 ug/m3). This new guideline is a concentration which is generally classed as very good air quality. It is important to remember that there is NO safe level of PM2.5 recognized by medical science.

At present, 99% of the world's population live with concentrations above this value, with the highest PM2.5 levels typically found in low- and middle-income countries.

Toxic lead pollution from a chipboard factory near Stirling could increase sharply after its operators won a five-year legal battle, the Scottish Government’s green watchdog has warned.

The Canadian forestry company, West Fraser, went to court to force the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) to allow a contaminated by-product to be burnt in an energy plant at Cowie in Stirlingshire.

But Sepa has now told The Ferret that lead emissions from the plant could rise by 47 per cent as a result – and put public health and the environment at increased risk. The Cowie site is already by far the biggest lead polluter in Scotland, discharging over a tonne into the air in 2022.

The risks are “profoundly disturbing” because lead in the environment is a “serious hazard for people and nature”, experts said. They questioned whether judges were better equipped to assess pollution risks than Sepa.

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"People used to say that SARS-CoV-2 only infects cells with certain receptors, especially those with the ACE2 receptor ..." said Professor Evan Snyder, MD, PhD, director of the Center for Stem Cells & Regenerative Medicine at Sanford Burnham Prebys. "We demonstrated that when a direct entry point was unavailable, the virus just punches through the cell membrane instead."

In an innovative leap forward for workplace safety, a research team at Seoul National University has developed the Bilateral Back Extensor Exosuit (BBEX), a robotic back-support device designed to prevent spinal injuries and assist workers in heavy lifting tasks.

This intricate design ensures that the device can offer comprehensive support during both symmetric and asymmetric lifting tasks, effectively reducing muscle fatigue and mechanical loading on spinal joints.

Highlights

•The paper presents the first evidence of Erythroxylum spp. in Europe in the 1600s.

•17th century brain tissue with active components of coca plant was found.

•Archaeotoxicology backdates Erythroxylum spp. use by almost two centuries in Europe.

Cocaine hydrochloride salts are one of the most commonly used drugs of our days, yet there is very little hard evidence regarding when people started consuming such an extensively popular drug in Europe. In this paper, we report the exceptional finding of Erythroxylum spp. in human remains dated to the 1600's in Milan, Italy.

Paradoxically, cigarette smoking is associated with a reduced risk of Parkinson’s Disease (PD). This led us to hypothesize that carbon monoxide (CO) levels, which are constitutively but modestly elevated in smokers, might contribute to neuroprotection.

In this study, we tested the hypothesis that low doses of carbon monoxide (CO), which are constitutively and intermittently elevated in individuals who smoke, might contribute to neuroprotection.

We demonstrate in genetic and toxin models of PD that treatment with low-dose CO preserves SNpc dopamine neurons and associated striatal dopamine.

Further, we show that CO treatment reduces the accumulation of αSyn within neuron somas and reduces the phosphorylation of αSyn that is associated with toxicity. These results suggest that the administration of low-dose CO in rodent PD models may afford neuroprotection and contribute to the reduced risk of PD among smokers.

Until low-dose CO is proven safe in PD, low-dose CO will nonetheless have value as a modulator of PD-relevant pathways with utility for its dissection and treatment.

In the context of the epidemiologic foundation that has identified smoking tobacco as a large inverse risk factor for PD, these results support the potential of pathways modified by low-dose CO to slow disease progression in PD. The present results demonstrating neuroprotection in PD models support further investigation of these pathways in PD.

Chronic kidney disease is the most common form of kidney disease and involves a slow and progressive deterioration of the kidneys' ability to cleanse the body.

Harmful substances and fluids that would otherwise have been excreted from the body with the urine are instead retained.

Research in recent years shows that outdoor air pollution particles from sources such as industry, vehicle exhaust and heating may increase the risk of chronic kidney disease.

The current study shows that this is also likely to be the case for occupational exposure to particles in the construction industry.

We see a clear link between having worked in construction environments with high dust levels and the risk of developing chronic kidney disease before the age of 65. But further studies are required to show whether there is a causal link and to identify the biological mechanisms.

A Berlin-led research team has uncovered critical regulators of severe kidney damage in patients with lupus, an autoimmune disorder affecting an estimated five million people worldwide, most of which are young women. A small, specialized population of immune cells — called innate lymphoid cells (ILCs) — trigger an avalanche of effects that cause harmful kidney inflammation, also known as lupus nephritis.

The research, published in Nature, upends conventional wisdom that autoantibodies — proteins produced by immune cells that mistakenly attack healthy tissues — are primarily responsible for lupus nephritis.

While autoantibodies are required for tissue damage, they are by themselves not sufficient. Our work reveals that ILCs are required to amplify the organ damage.

The findings reveal a sobering reality: many policy measures have failed to achieve the necessary scale of emissions reductions.

Only 63 cases of successful climate policies, each leading to average emission reductions of 19%, were identified. The key characteristic of these successful cases is the inclusion of tax and price incentives in well-designed policy mixes.

"Our findings demonstrate that more policies do not necessarily equate to better outcomes. Instead, the right mix of measures is crucial. For example, subsidies or regulations alone are insufficient; only in combination with price-based instruments, such as carbon and energy taxes, can they deliver substantial emission reductions."

While a mosquito bite is often no more than a temporary bother, in many parts of the world it can be scary. One mosquito species, Aedes aegypti, spreads the viruses that cause over 100,000,000 cases of dengue, yellow fever, Zika and other diseases every year. Another, Anopheles gambiae, spreads the parasite that causes malaria. The World Health Organization estimates that malaria alone causes more than 400,000 deaths every year. Indeed, their capacity to transmit disease has earned mosquitoes the title of deadliest animal.

Male mosquitoes are harmless, but females need blood for egg development. It's no surprise that there's over 100 years of rigorous research on how they find their hosts. Over that time, scientists have discovered there is no one single cue that these insects rely on. Instead, they integrate information from many different senses across various distances.

A team led by researchers at UC Santa Barbara has added another sense to the mosquito's documented repertoire: infrared detection. Infrared radiation from a source roughly the temperature of human skin doubled the insects' overall host-seeking behavior when combined with CO2 and human odor.

Combining detailed county-to-county migration data with Toxics Release Inventory data, and fine-scale PM2.5 concentration levels, we investigate the relationship between internal migration, income of migrant and non-migrant households and county-level differences in environmental quality. We show that households moving to “cleaner” counties are relatively “richer”—a result consistent with a sorting by income in the spirit of Tiebout (1956). An implication of this finding is that internal migration could contribute to the persistence of disparities in pollution exposure at the county-level.

Our findings suggest that destination counties with lower pollution levels than the migrants’ home counties attract wealthier households. From the perspective of Environmental Justice, this outcome is consistent with households self-selecting based on income across areas with different levels of environmental quality. Furthermore, our research contributes to the existing literature on internal migration by emphasizing how socioeconomic characteristics shape households’ responses to differences in destination attributes.

Research from Radboud university medical center reveals that T cells from the adaptive immune system can manipulate the memory of innate immune cells. Previously, it was believed that the memory of innate immune cells operated independently.

This surprising connection opens up new possibilities for the treatment of various diseases. A mouse model shows that no immunosuppressive drugs are needed after an organ transplantation if this interaction between T cells and the innate immunity is temporarily blocked after the transplantation.

Trained immunity is regulated by T cell-induced CD40-TRAF6 signaling

Highlights

•T cells modulate trained immunity induction in monocytes via CD40-TRAF6 signaling

•Blocking CD40-TRAF6 signaling inhibits trained immunity in monocytes in vitro

•SNPs in the proximity of CD40 associate with trained immunity responses in vivo

•Myeloid-specific CD40-TRAF6 inhibition prolongs allograft survival in vivo

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(24)01015-5

A multidisciplinary research team based across China and Brazil has used a dog-like robot and AI to create a new way to find fire ant nests.

Fire ant nests are difficult for untrained personnel to identify and confirm in the field, and searching large areas can be time-consuming and exhausting under the hot sun. A robot could automatically locate the nests without requiring specially trained individuals and operate at various times of the day regardless of temperature conditions.

RIFA is one of the most destructive pests worldwide. Accidentally introduced to the United States in the 1930s, they have since spread as an invasive organism across numerous areas including China, Japan and Europe, causing extensive environmental damage and economic losses.

Conventional approaches to controlling RIFA populations involve the use of pesticides, at the risk of harming local ecosystems. To implement effective and targeted RIFA control strategies which minimize the harm to native species, extensive monitoring of populations is essential.

Our bodies and organs are shielded from the external environment by tissue barriers like the skin. These barriers must be tightly sealed to prevent unwanted substances from entering. This sealing is achieved through structures called tight junctions. However, how these tight junctions form has long been a mystery.

Tight junction proteins bind to the surface of the cell membrane at the interface where the cells touch each other. When the number of proteins bound there reaches a certain threshold, the proteins condense into a liquid that gradually grows into a sort of drop on the cell surface.

Eventually, these drops elongate and touch each other to form a uniform belt around the cells. In this way, tight junctions seal the spaces between the cells to make our skin and organs airtight.

Perhaps everybody has seen it in winter. Tiny drops of water appear on a cold window. It's exactly that but on a molecular scale

By diverting their attention towards eating their dying neighbors, HFSCs keep inflammation-generating immune cells away

The findings have applications beyond the hair follicle, because it is only one of several areas of the body where there are few professional phagocytes around. In regions of the brain, breasts, and lungs, for example, epithelial and mesenchymal tissue cells, including stem cells, moonlight as ersatz phagocytes.

Stem cells tightly regulate dead cell clearance to maintain tissue fitness

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07855-6

Bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) is a chronic lung disease of prematurity. Exposure to noxious stimuli such as hyperoxia, volutrauma, and infection in infancy can have long-reaching impacts on lung health and predispose towards the development of conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in adulthood. BPD and COPD are both marked by lung tissue degradation, neutrophil influx, and decreased lung function. Both diseases also express a change in microbial signature characterized by firmicute depletion.

An interesting finding was the favorable performance of the LBP compared to fluticasone furoate, a widely studied FDA-approved inhaled corticosteroid found in COPD combination therapies.

The LBP reduced MMP-9 and other pro-inflammatory cytokines as well as, and in some cases better than, the steroid in the PPE + LPS COPD mouse model. Prolonged use of steroids for COPD exacerbations is associated with side effects, including increased risk of pneumonia, skin thinning, sepsis, and death.

Neutrophilic inflammation is steroid-resistant, a major therapeutic gap in the COPD therapeutic landscape.

In the future, our LBP may reduce or replace the need for inhaled steroids by virtue of their strong anti-inflammatory action combined with a more tolerable safety profile and additional potential structural benefits. Safety and biodistribution, as studied in the PPE emphysema model, indicated that inhalation of the LBP did not initiate adverse reactions in diseased mice. The Lactobacilli did not translocate to distal tissues or accumulate in the lungs, supporting the hypothesis that the bacteria have a localized yet transient presence in the airways. Furthermore, the LBP is susceptible to the antibiotics Cefuroxime, Azithromycin, Amoxicillin-clavulanate, Piperacillin-tazobactam, and Ceftriaxone, all of which are currently used to treat COPD exacerbations and may be used as rescue medication in a clinical setting.

Preclinical animal data is suggestive, and the safety of the potential drug in humans will be tested in a forthcoming clinical trial.

Construction is underway for the maximum-security Brazilian facility, which will face cost and regulatory hurdles.

Last month, Brazil celebrated breaking ground on what it hopes will become the first maximum-security biosciences laboratory in Latin America.  Many researchers are excited at the prospect of a facility where they can safely study the most dangerous pathogens in the region. However, some wonder about the cost of maintaining such a lab and are concerned about the pushback they are sure to receive from members of the public over housing deadly organisms there.