Danger Dust

Find could offer lessons for conserving key species in other places

Vultures have long been associated with death, and perhaps for good reason. With their hunched shoulders, hooked beaks, and signature bald heads, they fly around looking for dead and decaying animals to scavenge. But they also serve an important role in protecting human life, a new study finds.

The near-extinction of the birds across India in the 1990s led to the spread of disease-carrying pathogens from an excess of dead animals, killing more than a half-million people from 2000 to 2005. 

Vultures are a keystone species in India, essential to the functioning of many of the country’s ecosystems. The birds of prey don’t just clean up disease-ridden carcasses; by removing food, they reduce the populations of other scavengers, such as feral dogs that can transmit rabies. What’s more, without vultures, farmers dispose their dead livestock in waterways, further spreading disease.

And that’s exactly what happened. In 1994, farmers began giving a drug called diclofenac to cattle and other livestock for pain, inflammation, and other conditions. But it was poisonous to the vultures that fed on these animals, destroying their kidneys. In just a decade, Indian vulture populations fell dramatically, from 50 million individuals to just a couple thousand.

Anant Sudarshan saw the impacts firsthand. As an adolescent in India, Sudarshan—now an environmental economist at the University of Warwick—says the bodies of cattle accumulated outside tanneries and city limits, where fields became carcass dumps for feral dogs and other less efficient scavengers such as rats to feed on. When the remains piled up, the Indian government required tanneries to use chemicals to dispose of the waste, causing toxic substances to leech into waterways used by people.

Tragedy struck the Swiss town of Lausanne on Friday when a scaffold and transport platform/hoist collapsed, resulting in the deaths of three people and injuring nine others.

The incident occurred in Prilly, a suburb on the northwestern side of Lausanne, where a 19-story building was undergoing a major refurbishment.

The building, entirely covered with façade scaffold, had a transport platform/materials hoist installed.According to initial reports, the platform installation may have been faulty, potentially causing the collapse of the entire corner section of the scaffold. A telehandler was also buried under the debris from the fallen scaffold.

Emergency responders rushed to the scene to provide aid and investigate the cause of the collapse. The police have confirmed that three workers on the site were killed. Among the nine injured, four sustained serious injuries, while five others suffered more minor injuries.

Parkinson's disease is classically associated with the buildup of proteins called Lewy bodies in brain cells, but researchers found that 76% of individuals with CTE and Parkinsonism did not have Lewy body pathology.

CTE is a degenerative brain disease whose only known cause is repetitive head impacts, like those encountered in contact sports. A 2018 study by the same research team found that duration of contact sports play is associated with and increased odds of developing Lewy body disease. However, the present study is the first to describe a link between contact sport participation, brainstem pathology, and parkinsonism in CTE.

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Substantia Nigra Pathology, Contact Sports Play, and Parkinsonism in Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy

Key Points

Question  What are the key clinical and neuropathologic measures associated with parkinsonism in individuals with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)?

Findings  In this cross-sectional study of 481 brain donors with neuropathologically diagnosed CTE, parkinsonism was common (24.7%). Substantia nigra Lewy bodies, neurofibrillary tangles, dopaminergic neuronal loss, and age at death were significantly associated with parkinsonism.

Meaning  The findings suggest that multiple abnormal protein accumulations and neuronal loss are associated with parkinsonism in individuals with CTE in an age-dependent manner.

Conclusions and Relevance  In this cross-sectional study of contact sports athletes with CTE, years of contact sports participation were associated with SN tau pathology and neuronal loss, and these pathologies were associated with parkinsonism. Repetitive head impacts may incite neuropathologic processes that lead to symptoms of parkinsonism in individuals with CTE.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/article-abstract/2820667

SARS-CoV-2 has triggered a pandemic and contributes to long-lasting morbidity. Several studies have investigated immediate cellular and humoral immune responses during acute infection. However, little is known about long-term effects of COVID-19 on the immune system.

Conclusions COVID-19 causes long-term reduction of innate and adaptive immune cells which is associated with a Th2 serum cytokine profile. This may provide an immunological mechanism for long-term sequelae after COVID-19.

In a world-first discovery, Griffith University researchers have discovered that faulty cell function in veterans suffering from Gulf War Illness (GWI), also known as Gulf War Syndrome (GWS), is likely caused by intense exposure to hazardous biological and chemical agents during war service.

The findings from our research provides clear scientific evidence that the health problems experienced by Gulf War veterans can be directly linked to their exposure to specific hazardous agents during their service.

Our study reveals a crucial dysfunction in cell ion channels, specifically the transient receptor potential ion channels, in veterans with GWI.

This discovery is a significant step forward in understanding this baffling and complex illness.

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Novel characterization of endogenous transient receptor potential melastatin 3 ion channels from Gulf War Illness participants

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0305704

Dust can wear down equipment, harm vegetation and wildlife, and affect the quality of air, water and soil in an area. But most of all, dust affects the workers on the front lines of the mining industry.

Coal dust is second only to crystalline silica dust in the dangers posed to workers, but a combination of the two can be deadly.

Silicosis caused by silica exposure is estimated to currently affect around 100,000 people in Australia. Left untreated there is very real risk of those affected developing incurable lung diseases.

New Zealand’s largest and only national stone benchtop fabricator, AGB, is continuing its fight against silicosis with the announcement that it will be the first in the country to supply zero-silica engineered stone.

“If low-silica was the revolution, zero is the evolution. It’s actually not that big of a step to make. This is the next advancement of us being at the forefront of health and safety of workers – and our customers,”

Occupational exposure to inhaled crystalline silica dust (cSiO2) is linked to systemic lupus erythematosus, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic sclerosis, and anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic autoantibody vasculitis. 

Taken together, diverse disease-relevant autoreactive B cells, including cells specific for DNA, MPO, and basement membrane, are recruited to lung ectopic lymphoid aggregates in response to cSiO2 instillation. B cells that escape tolerance can contribute to local autoantibody production. Our demonstration of significantly enhanced autoantibody induction by TLR ligands further suggests that a coordinated environmental co-exposure can magnify autoimmune vulnerability.

Understanding the Sand Shortage: Why We're Running Out of Sand

The world uses 50 billion metric tons of sand annually.

Sand is a key ingredient in all concrete and glass production.

There are already ongoing reports of a mafia-style black market for sand.

The world is in crisis yet again. This time around, it’s a sand shortage.

The most-extracted solid material in the world, and second-most used global resource behind water, sand is an unregulated material used extensively in nearly every construction project on Earth. And with 50 billion metric tons consumed annually—enough to build an 88-foot-tall, 88-foot-wide wall around the world—our sand depletion is on the rise, and a completely unregulated rise at that.

Naturally occurring over thousands of years—if not hundreds of thousands of years, most sand originates in the mountains and forms as rivers bring it downstream toward oceans. Sure, head to beaches across the world to feel the sand between your toes, but sand does more than delight beachgoers and build cities. Sand also performs key environmental roles; it is a major factor in protecting from storm surges, ensuring healthy natural habitats for a variety of species, and protecting against erosion.

Infections and neurodegenerative diseases cause inflammation in the brain. But for unknown reasons, patients with brain inflammation often develop muscle problems that seem to be independent of the central nervous system. Now, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have revealed how brain inflammation releases a specific protein that travels from the brain to the muscles and causes a loss of muscle function.

The study, in fruit flies and mice, also identified ways to block this process, which could have implications for treating or preventing the muscle wasting sometimes associated with inflammatory diseases, including bacterial infections, Alzheimer's disease and long COVID.

When the brain is exposed to inflammatory proteins characteristic of these diseases, damaging chemicals called reactive oxygen species build up. The reactive oxygen species cause brain cells to produce an immune-related molecule called interleukin-6 (IL-6), which travels throughout the body via the bloodstream.

The study pinpoints potential targets for preventing or treating muscle weakness related to brain inflammation. The researchers found that IL-6 activates what is called the JAK-STAT pathway in muscle, and this is what causes the reduced energy production of mitochondria.

We're not sure why the brain produces a protein signal that is so damaging to muscle function across so many different disease categories

You can think of our atmosphere as a big chemistry set, a global churn of gaseous molecules and particles that constantly bounce off and change each other in complicated ways. While the particles are very small, often less than 1% of the thickness of human hair, they have outsized impacts. For example, particles are the seeds of cloud droplets, and the abundance of the particles changes the reflectivity and the amount of clouds, rainfall and climate.

The conventional thinking was that most particle formation occurs in cloud outflow regions, where clouds float into the upper troposphere and eventually evaporate. In that process, clouds are getting wrung out and most particles are removed by rain. As a result, the air in the outflow regions is clear and clean, leaving some gaseous molecules with nowhere to go but form new particles.

However, using the data collected from NASA's global-scale aircraft measurements, we found that most of the new particles are not formed in the outflow regions as previously thought.

Stratosphere air often dips in troposphere due to meandering jet stream. As the ozone-rich stratospheric air and more moist tropospheric air mix, it leads to a high concentration of hydroxyl radical (OH), an important oxidant that helps produce the type of molecules that nucleate and form new particles.

We found this phenomenon is widespread around the globe and likely occurs more frequently than the particle formation in the cloud outflows.

There’s more to beach sand than meets the eye. It has stories to tell about the land, and an epic journey to the sea. That’s because mountains end their lives as sand on beaches.

Over time, mountains erode. The mud, sand, gravel, cobbles and boulders they shed are washed into streams, which come together to form rivers. As they flow down to the sea, all this sediment is ground up and worn down in nature’s version of a rock tumbler.

Big rocks break down into smaller pieces, so most of what reaches the sea is mud. These silt and clay particles are too small to perceive with the naked eye. But you can see individual grains of sand, which are just bigger bits of rock.

How to Identify Rocks and Learn Their Backstory

Is your rock a single mineral or a rock type?

A rock can be a single mineral or made up of many minerals, and can be one igneous, sedimentary or metamorphic.

If your rock is a single mineral, it may be an obvious crystal or look more worn and rounded. For example, when a quartz crystal is weathered, it turns into a milky to clear rounded crystal.

Rock types are usually composed of multiple minerals and don’t appear as a single crystal.

If you see a lot of larger crystals, your rock is likely igneous, where large crystals formed in volcanic bodies slowly cooling underground.

If you see a lot of small crystals then it is likely from a volcanic body, nearer the surface, that cooled faster.

If the crystals in the rock seem deformed, or they’re small and red (garnets), then your rock is likely metamorphic, which means it formed but then was melted again at some point in the deep past.

Is your rock light or heavy?

Most rocks you may pick up will feel neither light nor heavy for their size, because the typical rock you’ll come across is mostly quartz and your brain has learned to categorize its density as “average.”

However, if your rock feels heavy for its size, then it contains denser elements such as iron, lead, manganese, and others further down on the periodic table. This tells you your rock is likely from some place deeper inside the planet, where denser elements are found, and made its way up to Earth’s surface through plate tectonics or other massive geologic processes.

If your rock is heavy and also feels like metal, it could be a pure chunk of a metallic mineral such as pyrite, silver, or even gold.

A rock that feels light will be made from less dense elements such as carbon, sodium, beryllium, calcium, and others. This suggests your rock was formed closer to the surface or even on the surface. Rocks that feel light because they are full of holes may be volcanic—the holes can indicate where gasses were trapped.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which includes chronic bronchitis and emphysema, is a long-term lung disease that makes it hard to breathe. Impacting 11.7 million people in the United States, many people think of it only as a disease that impacts people who smoke and use tobacco products, but long-term exposure to dust, chemicals, fumes and vapors from the workplace are also risk factors.

In fact, work-related exposures account for 10-20% of either respiratory symptoms or lung function impairment consistent with COPD.

The leading industries and job types that increase risk for COPD include agriculture, mining and manufacturing, however many types of workplaces, from construction to welding, can potentially expose workers to harmful irritants that can contribute to developing COPD. Workplace exposures include:

Secondhand smoke

Mineral dusts like silica, coal and asbestos

Organic dusts like cotton, wood and grains

Metal or welding fumes like cadmium

Diesel or exhaust fumes

Asphalt, tar fumes, or vapor in roads or roofing

Smoke from fires

Unfortunately, the committee, whose membership skews Republican (34 to 27), has proven that it is not actually interested in making a positive impact on every American life. Workers — particularly the most vulnerable among them — get the short end of the stick, and coal miners get a sharp knife in the back.

The language is bloodless, but the intent is utterly vicious: These highly paid, pampered modern aristocrats sat back in their padded chairs and casually handed down a potential death sentence to 44,000 people. 

That’s how many coal miners currently work in the U.S. as of June 2024. One in 5 of those miners — those who have spent more than 20 years underground — is suffering from coal miner’s pneumoconiosis, the dreadful degenerative lung disease known more colloquially as black lung.

When it comes to accurately diagnosing a disease, you might think you need expensive, high-tech machinery and equipment capable of looking deep beneath the skin at what’s going on in the body. But while these high-tech implements certainly are incredible, they aren’t the only instruments capable of detecting disease. In fact, you may even share a home with one of these powerful disease-detecting agents.

There are numerous of instances of unsuspecting pet owners learning they had a health problem from their pet. Examples include dogs licking, sniffing and even trying to chew spots on their owner’s skin – spots that were later diagnosed as malignant melanoma.

In fact, many species of animals – from the microscopic worm C elegans, to ants, mice and dogs – have all successfully demonstrated the ability to detect diseases in people and from biological samples during experiments.

Many species (including dogs, rats and bees) can detect very subtle changes in substances called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that the body releases in very low levels, even when healthy. In fact, exhaled human breath contains approximately 3,500 different VOCs. The composition and concentration of VOCs the body releases changes based on a person’s health – and will be different if they’re fighting an infection or dealing with a health problem.

The disease-detecting abilities of animals aren’t just for human benefit, either. The worm C elegans can not only detect cancer in human samples, their superior olfactory senses mean they can also detect cancer in samples from dogs and cats.

Digging holes in sand might seem innocent, but if the hole is deep enough and collapses on a person, it is extremely difficult to escape. In fact, research suggests more people die from sand burial suffocation than from shark attacks.

Sand isn’t actually a type of material. It’s a category of material size, ranging from 0.0025 to 0.08 inches (0.06 to 2 millimeters) in diameter. The type of sand is determined by the materials making it up. Quartz sand, made up of silicon dioxide, is the most common sand found on beaches, except at tropical coasts where coral sand beaches, made up of calcium carbonate, are found.

Material coarser than sand is not soft to the touch – it doesn’t make sturdy sandcastles. Silt and clay, which are finer than sand, make water murky and are commonly called mud.

Sand’s weight depends on the materials it’s made of. Pure quartz sand beaches, which have very white sand, weigh around 90 pounds per cubic foot when dry.

But most beaches contain a mixture of minerals, creating a tan or brown appearance. The minerals that darken the sand are much heavier – sand on most beaches would weigh up to 130 pounds per cubic foot when dry.

Dry, loose grains of sand will form a pile with a slope angle of about 33 degrees, termed its angle of repose. The angle of repose is the steepest angle at which a pile of grains remains stable, and the force of friction between each grain determines that stability.

Sand is more stable when it’s wet because the surface tension between water and sand grains can hold the pile of sand in place vertically. But once it dries, the pile will collapse, as there’s no more surface tension.

So if you dig a hole in the beach, it’ll stay stable for as long as the sand stays moist. Once it dries, the hole collapses.

Big animal, big problem

When a whale dies at sea, it will initially sink but may refloat after a day or two, as gas develops in its intestines. If the carcass washes up on the beach, it must be dealt with.

Disposing of dead whales is complicated. Last century, authorities sought to blow up the carcasses to break them into smaller, more manageable pieces – a method, thankfully, which is no longer pursued.

In most cases these days, whale remains are buried in sand dunes or trucked to landfill.

Simulating the drift of a whale carcass towed to sea would reduce the risk of it being washed back ashore and help determine the best possible release location.

This would allow for more deceased whales to be returned to sea, where their remains play an important role in the marine ecosystem.

Northwestern Medicine and Brigham and Women's Hospital scientists have discovered a molecular defect that promotes the pathologic immune response in systemic lupus erythematosus (known as lupus) and show that reversing this defect may potentially reverse the disease.

Lupus affects more than 1.5 million people in the U.S. Until this new study, the causes of this disease were unclear. Lupus can result in life-threatening damage to multiple organs including the kidneys, brain and heart. Existing treatments often fail to control the disease, the study authors said, and have unintended side effects of reducing the immune system's ability to fight infections.

"Up until this point, all therapy for lupus is a blunt instrument. It's broad immunosuppression," 

There are disease-associated changes in multiple molecules in the blood of patients with lupus. Ultimately, these changes lead to insufficient activation of a pathway controlled by the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR), which regulates cells' response to environmental pollutants, bacteria or metabolites.

Insufficient activation of AHR results in too many disease-promoting immune cells, called the T peripheral helper cells, that promote the production of disease-causing autoantibodies.

The UK’s health and safety watchdog is meeting its Australian counterparts to discuss the country’s ban on kitchen worktops linked to a deadly lung disease in hundreds of workers, after the first British cases were identified.

A report by policy body Safe Work Australia recommending that engineered stone be banned led to the country becoming the first to outlaw the material in December.

The material is used to make worktops and is popular in kitchen makeovers.

This week, members of Safe Work Australia are meeting experts from the UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) to discuss the ban, amid warnings that Britain is facing its own outbreak of silicosis – as first revealed by i in February.

The report by Safe Work Australia found workers in engineered stone were dramatically overrepresented among workers diagnosed with silicosis, the majority of whom were under 35.

Men in their 30s and 40s have been left needing lung transplants after suffering exposure to the dust while cutting quartz countertops without adequate safety measures.

It’s believed up to 10 cases have been detected so far in the UK, with the first emerging last year

For many Australians, the mere mention of asbestos is enough to evoke images of tragedy and suffering. In the early 1900s it was a common material in homes, furnishings, and machinery. Houses built in the 1940s-1960s were predominantly constructed with asbestos roofing, where fibres were mixed with cement to give it its shape. Because of its durability, affordability and insulative properties, usage was widespread in the first half of the 20th century

It wasn’t until the 1970s that there was any awareness of asbestos-related diseases such as mesothelioma or asbestosis (cancer and lung scarring respectively), both of which can cause severe respiratory distress and death.

Today Indonesia is the world’s second largest importer. Asbestos manufacturing occurs nation-wide, and there exists no outright prohibition on usage.

Usage of the mineral is extremely common, especially in the form of roofing (comprising approximately 90 per cent of asbestos manufacturing). 50 per cent of the buildings in Jakarta are estimated to contain white asbestos, whereas across the country the rate is thought to be 10 per cent. And usage will likely escalate as industrial lobbyists attempt to expand the market.

Method for the detection of tuberculosis (TB) in children using modified FFP2 masks shows that children suffering from TB are unlikely to produce aerosols responsible for the transmission of this lung disease.

The diagnosis of tuberculosis in adults is usually made from sputum (sputum) in the microbiology laboratory. In children, however, the diagnosis is usually made clinically, as the disease often cannot be detected in them using standard laboratory tests. As a rule, they do not produce sputum.

FFP2 masks filter the exhaled air and have already been used successfully in adults to detect the genetic material of tuberculosis bacteria (M. tuberculosis-DNA). Until now, there has been no corresponding study for children. 

Although our method showed such a low detection limit, we were unable to detect the genetic material of the tuberculosis bacteria in clinical use in children. These results indicate that children with pulmonary tuberculosis probably do not form aerosols through which the bacteria are transmitted.

Blast from the Past: In 1924 Scientific American Loved Coal (and Telepathy)

It’s well known that petrochemicals are toxic to our health. Here’s how to steer clear of these by-products of the fossil fuel industry.

“The Family Tree of Coal Tar.”

The roots of this stately tree are shown to be planted firmly in black coal, and its branches split into a dizzying array of byproducts—which are then used to make an equally dizzying array of consumer goods. In 1924 Scientific American writers gushed over all the ways that coal tar derivatives might show up in your home. Here is a quote from the caption below the illustration:

“Delicate perfumes, beautiful dyes, drugs, fire-extinguishing solutions, motor fuels, powerful explosives, fertilizers—these are but a few of the many diversified products based on coal tar.”

These days, as more folks become aware of the environmental dangers that fossil fuels pose, not to mention their health risks. Their inclusion in everyday products gets a lot less publicity.

For instance, you might not be aware that most of the fabric fibers used in clothing today are petroleum-based or that about 99 percent of all plastics are derived from fossil fuels. Petrochemicals, which are chemicals made from fossil fuels, show up in many thousands of different consumer products, including everything from crayons to cosmetics. Because of that, petrochemical production is actually climbing even as we work to cut down on fossil fuel use to power our vehicles and homes.

To understand why some cancers successfully circumvent the immune system to grow unchecked, researchers turned to pregnancy.

"In pregnancy, the immune system does not reject the growing fetus, so we know there must be mechanisms active in the placenta. In cancer, it's the same thing: the growing tumor is not rejected by the immune system. It means the cancer cells have developed strategies to suppress immune rejection, the same as in pregnancy.

They found that indeed there is a molecular mechanism shared in cancer and pregnancy that suppresses the immune system. Block this mechanism, called B7-H4, and the immune system revs up to slow cancer's growth. Looking at mouse models and cell lines of breast and gynecologic cancers, the researchers identified the hormone progesterone as a key regulator of the B7-H4 immune checkpoint.

Progestogen-driven B7-H4 contributes to onco-fetal immune tolerance

Highlights

•B7-H4 contributes to the onco-fetal immune tolerance

•Progesterone drives B7-H4 expression via the PR-P300-BRD4 axis

•B7-H4 expression is controlled by the −58 kb enhancer

•PR antagonist or selective BRD4 degrader sensitizes B7-H4+ tumors to immunotherapy

https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00652-4?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867424006524%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

Vaccines provide a front-line defense against dangerous viruses, training adaptive immune cells to identify and fight specific pathogens.

But innate immune cells—the first responders to any bodily invader—have no such specific long-term memory. Still, scientists have found that they can reprogram these cells to be even better at their jobs, potentially fighting off seasonal scourges like the common cold or even new viral diseases for which vaccines have not yet been developed.

What the team found surprised them: 13 of the top 24 small molecule compounds that produced the most cytokines were glucocorticoids, a class of steroids. Hydrocortisone and prednisolone, for example, belong to this group.

But these steroids are known to suppress certain parts of the immune system, like inflammation.