• Research reveals taking pictures of food isn't just content for our social media feeds, but could be the key to improving people's diets

• Proteobacteria and Firmicutes
• a detailed examination of the bacterial and archaeal communities found within the waters of the popular tourist attraction in the city of Bath
• Scientists collected samples of water, sediment and biofilm from locations within the Roman Baths complex including the King's Spring (where the waters reach around 45°C) and the Great Bath, where the temperatures are closer to 30°C.
• The samples were then analysed using cutting edge sequencing technology and traditional culturing techniques were employed to isolate bacteria with antibiotic activity.

2 more annotations...

• people who were exposed to higher levels of noise from aircraft were more likely to have a higher body mass index, an indicator for obesity that can lead to stroke or hypertension. The findings highlight how the environment—and environmental injustices—can shape health outcomes
• self-reported body mass index (BMI)
• The study is the first to explore a connection between aircraft noise exposure and obesity nationwide in the United States; past studies on this subject have focused on European populations, and results have varied
• “Prior research has shown that aircraft noise can elevate stress responses and disturb sleep, but there has been mixed evidence of any links with body mass index,” says study lead and corresponding author Matthew Bozigar, assistant professor of epidemiology at OSU and a former postdoctoral associate at SPH. “We were surprised to see a fairly robust link between aircraft noise and higher body mass index among women across the US.”
• These new findings underscore the role of the environment on one’s risk of chronic disease.
• Junenette Peters, associate professor of environmental health, and colleagues examined airplane noise exposure and self-reported BMI and other individual characteristics among nearly 75,000 participants living around 90 of the major US airports
• The team examined aircraft noise levels every five years from 1995 to 2010, using a day-night estimate (DNL) that captures the average noise level over a 24-hour period and applies a 10 dB adjustment for aircraft noise occurring at night, when background noise is low.
• Although the team acknowledges that BMI is a suboptimal metric, the independent and strong association between more aircraft noise exposure and higher BMI that they observed is notable.
• “We can only hypothesize about why we saw these regional variations, but one reason may relate to the era of regional development, building characteristics, and climate which may affect factors such as housing age, design, and level of insulation,” says Peters. “Regional differences in temperature and humidity may influence behaviors such as window opening, so perhaps study participants living in the West were more exposed to aircraft noise due to open windows or housing type, which allowed more noise to penetrate.”
• Previous data suggest that Black, Hispanic, and low-income populations are disproportionately exposed to aircraft noise. The participants in the NHS study groups were primarily White and of mid-level socioeconomic status. 

• “We need to study the potential health impacts of environmental injustices in transportation noise exposures alongside other environmental drivers of poor health outcomes” Bozigar says. “There is a lot more to figure out, but this study adds evidence to a growing body of literature that noise negatively impacts health.”

      

9 more annotations...

• The impending danger of climate change and pollution can now be seen on the world panorama. The concentration of CO₂, the most important Green House Gas (GHG), has reached to formidable levels.
• (iii) microalgae cultivation
• Furthermore, microalgae can be fed with notorious waste gasses such as CO₂ and NO_x, SO_x from flue gas, inorganic and organic carbon, N, P and other pollutants from agricultural, industrial and sewage wastewater sources so as to provide us with opportunities to transform them into bioenergy, valuable products and forms that cause least harm to the environment
• The uncomplicated cellular structures and rapid growth of microalgae endow them with CO₂ fixation efficiency as higher as 10–50 folds than terrestrial plants
• Recently, many research studies have come up showing the positive impact of growing microalgae under high concentrations of Ci in the form of pure gaseous CO₂, real or simulated flue gas, or soluble carbonate (bicarbonate), reporting increased carbon bio-fixation and biomass productivity
• Despite such remarkable potential, the production of microalgae for low-value bulk products, such as proteins for food/feed applications, fatty acids for nutraceuticals or bulk products such as biofuels, is heretofore, not economically feasible
• The microalgal biomass majorly constituted of lipids (7–23%), proteins (6–71%) and carbohydrates (5–64%), depending upon the microalgal specie and culture conditions
• Biofuels from microalgae, production system, conversion technologies, life cycle analyses have been extensively reviewed, hence detailed description is not presented in this review.
• the lipid content of common microalgae such as Chlorella, Dunaliella, Isochrysis, Nannochloris, Nannochloropsis, Neochloris, Phaeodactylum, Porphyridium, and Schizochytrium, varies between 20 and 50% of cell dry weight
• can be augmented to higher levels by manipulating environmental and other growth factors, process optimization and genetic modifications of the production strain. Nitrogen starvation and salinity stress are known to induce an increase in TAG (triacylglycerol) accumulation and relative content of oleic acid in most of the microalgal species
• C14:0, C16:0, C18:1, C18:2, and C18:3 fatty acids, yet the relative composition varies from species to species
• The lipids can be converted into FAMEs (fatty acid methyl esters) via transesterification for biodiesel production.
• Furthermore, the residual de-oiled microalgal biomass can be used for animal feed.
• The resistance of cell wall to enzyme hydrolysis is one of the prime bottleneck in the Anaerobic digestion (AD) process. The overall economic feasibility of the process depends on the factors affecting AD, microalgal strain, biomass pretreatment, and culture methods (Jankowska et al., 2017). Lately, to make the system economically viable and environmentally sustainable, a closed-loop production scheme is being adopted wherein AD effluents are recycled and used as an input in the first step of AD. Jankowska et al. (2017) have presented a detailed review microalgae’s cultivation, harvesting and pretreatment for AD for biogas production.

• Bioethanol

   

  The carbohydrate part (mainly glucose, starch, cellulose, and hemicellulose) of the microalgal dry biomass can be used for transforming into bioethanol via fermentation. Although, microalgae accumulate relatively low quantities of sugars, the absence of lignin from microalgal structure makes them advantageous over other feedstock such as corn, sugarcane, and lignocellulosic biomass (Odjadjare et al., 2015; Jambo et al., 2016). Isochrysis galbana, Porphyridium cruentum, Spirogyra sp., Nannochloropsis oculate, Chlorella sp., are mainly exploited microalgae for the production of carbohydrates
• Despite having notable significance, limited number of studies have reported laboratory stage work on the fermentation of microalgae biomass to butanol (Cheng et al., 2015; Gao et al., 2016; Wang et al., 2016).

• Value-Added Products

   

  In the context of biorefinery approach, intracellular compounds and metabolites have gained immense importance owing to their high monetary value. Microalgal pigments: chlorophyll a and b, lutein, astaxanthin, β-carotene, phycobilins, C- phycocyanin have found wide application in dyes, cosmetics, food and feed additives, nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals, as natural colors, bioactive components, anti-oxidants, nutritive and neuro-protective agents (Koller et al., 2014; Begum et al., 2016). Microalgae are also exploited as rich source of amino acids (leucine, asparagine, glutamine, cysteine, arginine, aspartate, alanine, glycine, lysine, and valine), Carbohydrates (β1–3- glucan, amylose, starch, cellulose, and alginates), Vitamins and minerals (vitamin B1, B2, B6, B12, C, and E; biotin, folic acid, magnesium, calcium, phosphate, iodine) that are widely used in Food additives, health supplements and medicine. Microalgae, such as Nannochloropsis, Tetraselmis, and Isochrysis are used for extraction of long chain fatty acids popularly known as the omega fatty acids such as DHA (Docosahexaenoic Acid) and EPA (Eicosapentaenoic Acid), have lately gained prime attention as essential for human brain development and health. Other than these, microalgae are also used for production of Extracellular Polymeric Substances (EPSs) which have many industrial applications and Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs). PHAs can be used for manufacturing bioplastics that are very sought after because of their biodegradability (Markou and Nerantzis, 2013; Koller et al., 2014).
• Although many have reported successful utilization of microalgal biomass for the production of bioproducts within a biorefinery framework, the economic feasibility is unrealized and the microalgae biorefinery is way much expensive (’t Lam et al., 2017; Zhou et al., 2017). To attain feasibility and sustainability, both upstream processing (USP) and downstream processing (DSP) need to be efficiently simplified and integrated. The efficiency of the USP is determined by microalgal strain selection, nutrient supply (CO₂, N, and P) and culture conditions (temperature, light intensity) (Vanthoor-Koopmans et al., 2013). Whereas, the constraints at the DSP level are mainly characterized by harvesting, cell disruption, and extraction methods. DSP, specifically harvesting accounts for 20–40% of the total production costs and for a multi-product biorefinery, the cost increases to 50–60% (’t Lam et al., 2017).
• high throughput screening techniques like 96-well microplate swivel system (M96SS) have made processing upto 768 microalgal samples at the same time, possible
• Bioprospecting suitable microalgae is a crucial but time intensive step
• mixed diverse community of microalgae, dominated by Desmodesmus spp., could be adapted over a time of many months to survive in 100% flue gas from an unfiltered coal-fired power plant containing 11% CO₂
• Besides stress manipulation and acclimatization, desirable traits of the microalgal strains can be effectively improved by genetic and metabolic engineering/synthetic biology. Lately, genome editing tools such as Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats – CRISPR associated protein 9 (CRISPR-Cas9) and Transcription Activator-Like (TAL) Effector Nucleases (TALEN) are being used in microalgal gene alterations. Moreover, gene-interfering tools, such as CRISPR-dCas9, micro RNA (miRNA), and silence RNA (siRNA) are being explored to alter the gene expression unlike gene modification.
• Large scale microalgal cultivation and nutrient supply pose huge economic burden. In this context emphasis is being laid on biofilm based attached cultivation rather than aqua-suspend methods that have massive water requirement, low biomass productivity, energy intensive and cannot be easily scaled up
• Centrifugation is the most efficient (>95% efficiency) method for harvesting microalgae
• Flocculation is a low-cost alternative. Cationic chemical flocculants and polymeric flocculants are generally used (Brennan and Owende, 2010), but can negatively affect the toxicity of the biomass and output water (Ryan, 2009). Zhou et al. (2012) reported a novel fungi assisted bioflocculation technique, in which a filamentous fungal spores were added to the algal culture under optimized conditions and the pellets were formed after 2 days that can be harvested by simple filtration. Attached culture can also make harvesting simple (Wang et al., 2017).
• Microalgae based carbon capture technologies are certainly promising but their successful implementation is still to be realized.
• But, the prospects of successful commercial deployment lie in unsophisticated innovations in DSP, particularly harvesting, cell disruption and extraction, which can actually cut down the costs at a biorefinery level, along with process integration.

25 more annotations...

• Researchers conducting a study at a high-traffic intersection in a Jersey Shore town have found that the installation of a bike lane along the road approaching the convergence reduced driving speeds.
• "We are giving you more evidence that bike lanes save lives,"
• The research team started by creating a temporary bike lane on Cookman and Asbury Avenues on the side of the road heading toward the beach, delineating it with orange road cones.
• They found that the presence of the delineated bike lane made a difference: a 28 percent reduction in average maximum speeds and a 21 percent decrease in average speeds for vehicles turning right.
• In addition, drivers moving at a perpendicular angle to the bike lane did not slow down.
• With pedestrian deaths rising nationally, a study such as this could contribute to the development of new traffic policies or the reversal of older ones, Younes said.

4 more annotations...

• The taproot went down further
• More spikes popped out on the stem
• The flowers became more toxic
• Although studies have often highlighted weed fitness and defense traits resulting from disturbances like mowing, most were limited to foliar, or leaf, defenses, Kariyat said. That changed when Vasquez and fellow master's biology students at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley monitored fields of mowed, unmowed and frequently mowed silverleaf nightshade in and around Edinburg, Texas.
• "Alejandro's question was, 'how do these flowers differ between mowed and unmowed plants?'"
• "You are trying to mow these plants so that the plants are getting eliminated," Kariyat said. "But what you are actually doing here, you are making them much worse, much stronger."

• The observations of mowed, unmowed and frequently mowed areas with silverleaf nightshade provide evidence that could prompt further studies by weed scientists on best management practices, Kariyat said.

   
• the study does provide more insight into the defensive capabilities of plants pitted against human disturbance
• "Continuous mowing differentially affects floral defenses in the noxious and invasive weed Solanum elaeagnifolium in its native range."

• Journal Reference:

   
   
  1. Alejandro Vasquez, Alexa Alaniz, Robert Dearth, Rupesh Kariyat. Continuous mowing differentially affects floral defenses in the noxious and invasive weed Solanum elaeagnifolium in its native range. Scientific Reports, 2024; 14 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-58672-w

8 more annotations...

• Focusing on a rigid list of disciplines overshadows the other attributes that global leaders hold highly when looking for new talent. Skills such as leadership, curiosity, and building resilience are emphasised by many leaders and are the focus of targeted initiatives including the RSA’s ‘Capabilities for Life’ framework.
• nearly 3.5 million ‘STEM’ jobs that need to be filled in the U.S alone by 2025