Good morning, gnusies!
Short round up today because I worked the polls yesterday, but I don’t think that’s going to stop anyone from celebrating. My location had slightly over 72% turnout altogether, higher than some presidential general elections. Wowsers!
Winners from yesterday:
Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Democrats, women, people who want control over their own bodies and healthcare, on and on and on… I digress.
Some arguably non (or at least less!) political news:
Have some music:
From the “I got 99 problems and 1 solution” files:
A study published this week in Nature Regenerative Medicine showed that when applied in a cream, the synthetic melanin can protect skin from sun exposure and heal skin injured by sun damage or chemical burns. The technology works by scavenging free radicals, which are produced by injured skin such as a sunburn. Left unchecked, free radical activity damages cells and ultimately may result in skin aging and skin cancer.
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“People don’t think of their everyday life as an injury to their skin,” said co-corresponding author Dr. Kurt Lu, who teaches dermatology and practices at Northwestern University School of Medicine. “If you walk barefaced every day in the sun, you suffer a low-grade, constant bombardment of ultraviolet light. This is worsened during peak mid-day hours and the summer season.”
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“The synthetic melanin is capable of scavenging more radicals per gram compared to human melanin,” said co-corresponding author Nathan Gianneschi, a professor of chemistry and pharmacology at Northwestern. “It’s like super melanin. It’s biocompatible, degradable, nontoxic and clear when rubbed onto the skin. In our studies, it acts as an efficient sponge, removing damaging factors and protecting the skin.”
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Melanin could protect from toxins including nerve gas—and the team’s research on melanin is partly funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health. They showed they could dye a military uniform black with the melanin, and that would absorb the nerve gas. Additionally, their observation that melanin protects biologic tissue from high energy radiation, shows it may be an effective treatment for skin burns from radiation exposure.
Melanin also absorbs heavy metals and toxins. “Although it can act this way naturally, we have engineered it to optimize absorption of these toxic molecules with our synthetic version,” Gianneschi said.
As amazing as this development appears to be, the one aspect that I personally zeroed in on that seemed to be missing from the article itself was the potential for it to (eventually) replace environmentally toxic sunscreens.
And, as always, more info at the link!
I have reported on scientists harnessing e. coli to produce electricity. Now it’s being taught a new trick!
University of Edinburgh scientists engineered a simple E. coli bacteria to eat our litter and regurgitate it into something else. Writing in ACS Central Science, the researchers announced it was the first “one-pot” solution for making plastic waste useful, or valorizing it, using microbes.
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The E. coli can upcycle discarded PET into adipic acid, widely relied on in cosmetic, pharmaceutical, and fragrance industries.
Adipic acid is generally created by an energy-intensive process that’s reliant on fossil fuels, and the team hopes their study will encourage industries to use fossil alternatives.
“This approach enables the upcycling of waste carbon from existing industrial processes to create circular economies, avoiding the environmental consequences of landfill and/or incineration processes,” write the authors.
Cross-laminated timber (CLT) also known as “mass-timber” is taking the construction world by storm with its incredible durability, robust fire resistance, low carbon footprint, and beautiful aesthetic. In Europe, CLT has been used to build skyscrapers, aka “plyscrapers.”
In Portland’s new terminal, a giant roof for the main atrium—9 acres in area, is being built with CLT made from Douglas fir, hemlock, and southern yellow pine sourced entirely from within 300 miles of its location, all from either Oregon landowners or Tribal nations.
“The process was so exacting, the architects knew every board that frames the skylights above the 26 Y-columns came from the Yakama Nation, and all the double beams in the six massive oval skylights came from the Coquille Indian Tribe,” writes Patrick Sisson from Fast Company.
“The Portland project has almost created a market across the country,” Dean Lewis, director of mass timber and prefabrication for Skanska, the company that is handling construction, told the magazine. “We’re getting calls from Atlanta and New York asking about the kinds of timber we can get within 300 miles of the city. ‘Can we do that here?’ They all want that local story.”
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Mass timber is also, despite the chopping down of the trees, a low-carbon building solution. Concrete manufacturing is one of the three largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the world economy, and part of the appeal of mass timber is that by the time the tree is of the right age for building, the carbon absorbed in the tree is not only significant but removed from the global carbon cycle when it’s turned into mass timber.
As if the Galapagos Islands weren’t amazing enough:
An international expedition from the Schmidt Ocean Institute has revealed the presence of two pristine, cold-water coral reefs growing alongside the walls and bases of several seamounts over 1,000 feet below the surface.
Tropical coral reefs typically grow within 120 feet of the surface, but have sometimes been found at lower depths. These however were cold-water corals, known sometimes by their shorthand of “stony corals,” and were found at depths ranging from 1,200 to 1,375 feet (370 to 420 meters).
The larger of the two reefs spans over 800 meters in length, the equivalent of eight football fields. The second, smaller reef measures 250 meters in length. They exhibit a rich diversity of stony coral species, suggesting that they have likely been forming and supporting marine biodiversity for thousands of years.
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These are the second and third deep-sea coral reefs found in the Galapagos Island Marine Reserve, following the discovery of the first one this April by scientists onboard a research vessel from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
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“This information is not only valuable from a scientific perspective, but it also provides a solid foundation for decision-making that effectively protects these ecosystems, safeguarding the biological diversity they harbor and ensuring their resilience in a constantly changing environment,” stated Danny Rueda Córdova, director of the Galápagos National Park Directorate.
That’s it for me, fellow gnusies!