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Esophageal math

For most human beings swallowing food and water is as natural as breathing. We take the stretchy tube that transports food from the mouth to the stomach for granted.

The best-case scenario is the tube moves in peristalsis (smooth, wave-like contractions), pushing food down effortlessly. But sometimes the system malfunctions and food is met with tube spasms, weaker pushes, pushes so strong they are painful (jackhammer esophagus) or a full halt (achalasia) at the lower esophageal sphincter — the gateway to the stomach.

A team of researchers from Kyushu University, however, has created a simulation model that emulates how the esophagus functions when it’s working properly and what happens when it isn’t.

The mathematical model acts like a virtual esophagus that can mimic normal and abnormal patterns by adjusting the dials representing nerves, muscle reactions and timing. Almost like a flight simulator for the esophagus.

This simulator offers doctors and scientists a look into why things sometimes go wrong in the esophagus while allowing them to test ideas safely and experiment with how minute changes might lead to real-world disorders.

The research aims to be a catalyst for diagnosis and fine-tuning treatments for those with swallowing disorders.

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Flu fighters

From October to February in the Northern Hemisphere, temperatures drop, weather changes and the flu virus gets handed around like a Pass the Parcel game at a birthday party. Except this is the gift that no one wants.

This flu season is expected to be one of the worst on record, but experts say we’re prepared.

Listen to the Deep Dive:

To get through the annual flu season, the global population equips itself with immune-boosting hacks and symptom-suppressing meds.

Many choose to treat symptoms with home remedies.

Sore throat? Try honey and warm tea. Or licorice root tea. Or apple cider vinegar. Clogged sinuses? Try a warm compress. Or ginger and turmeric tea. Or apple cider vinegar. Cough? Try peppermint. Or a humidifier. Or, you guessed it, apple cider vinegar.

The immune system is the sensing system, so it’s really in tune with what you’re doing within your daily life,

– Jenna Macciochi, immunologist at University of Sussex

There are a lot of hacks to make us feel temporarily better, but what is it that will get us better quicker or help us avoid the flu altogether?

The annual flu vaccine is a good start. But do you need it if you had it just last year?

According to the Cleveland Clinic, the answer is yes.

“Scientists develop new vaccines that will offer protection against the new strains that are most likely to make you unwell that year. Our immunity also decreases over time, so an annual vaccine is the best way to ensure you’re protected,” the website says.

And the vaccine isn’t just for the most at risk, like the elderly or immunocompromised, it’s for everyone: “The virus can infect even the healthiest of individuals and when serious, can lead to hospitalization and even death.”

It’s best to protect yourself and those around you but if you happen to contract the flu virus, you can pound back a couple of Panadol Daytimes, which mask clogged sinuses, sneezes, body pain and runny eyeballs, or you can listen to what the experts say.

And they say rest and listening to our bodies is the best medicine.

In a 2024 episode of the Zoe Science and Nutrition Podcast, Jenna Macciochi, an immunologist at the University of Sussex in the U.K., said our bodies are always communicating with us.

“Immune cells are putting out chemical messengers that are acting on your brain to change your behavior. And these are called sickness behaviors.

Because we don’t want you with your infection going about your daily life, walking down the street, going into the office, speaking to people, because A, you’re going to spread that infection, and B, you’re consuming energy that your body could instead put into getting well again,” Macciochi says.

IMAGE: Pixabay-AI

The problem is, slowing down is not always easy, so we often rely on symptom-suppressing pharmaceuticals.

Our body is fatigued when we have the flu because it wants us to put our daily activities on hold to preserve energy in order to activate the immune response to fight off the infection. “There’s sort of like a metabolic switch that says, OK, person’s going to feel tired because we need that energy for the immune cells,” she says.

Ignoring our body’s need for rest is why symptoms often hang around longer than we expect.

The best way to combat the flu, however, is to be proactive.

This doesn’t mean boosting our immune system or power-drinking vitamin C during flu season. In fact, that won’t help you. But taking care of your immune system year-round will.

Macciochi says she believes we need to start thinking differently about our immune systems. “The immune system is the sensing system, so it’s really in tune with what you’re doing within your daily life,” Macciochi says.

There might be something that contains a certain amount of vitamin C, which means they can use that immune-boosting wording on their packaging, but it’s not going to make you invincible.

– Jenna Macciochi, immunologist at University of Sussex

Immune cells come in a variety of types. They aren’t solely responsible for fighting off flus or colds. Each kind of immune cell has its own job.

If we break a bone, for example, there is often tissue damage. When the damage is detected, the tissue brings immune cells to the injury location to start the healing process.

Macciochi says immune cells are also always on cancer watch. “You have specific immune cells patrolling your body all the time, looking for cancer or potentially cancerous cells, and removing them before they become a problem for your body.”

A 2024 study by researchers at the University of Houston in Texas shows that exercising for 15 minutes daily can boost the level of natural killer cells. These are white blood cells that fight infected and cancerous cells. They are called natural because they don’t require previous exposure to a pathogen in order to destroy it.

While immune boosting and dosing ourselves with vitamin C are popular this time of year, the immune system needs constant attention.

It’s simple, really. We get out of our bodies what we put into them. And since the dawn of convenience food, we are eating much more of the things our systems don’t respond well to.

These include ultra-processed foods that have been found to induce inflammatory responses.

The Harvard School of Public Health says, “Diets that are limited in variety and lower in nutrients, such as consisting primarily of ultra-processed foods and lacking in minimally processed foods, can negatively affect a healthy immune system.”

IMAGE: Pixabay

A diet rich in fiber and plant-based foods, including fruits, vegetables, whole grains and legumes, promotes the growth and sustenance of beneficial microbes. Some of these microbes convert fibers into short-chain fatty acids, which have been found to enhance the activity of immune cells.

With a diet like this, the body will have adequate vitamins for each stage of the body’s immune response. Micronutrients like vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, selenium, iron and protein are essential for immune-cell function and growth.

Supplements can help, but overdosing on things like vitamin C will not.

While the body is complex, taking care of it is simple. As per usual, medical and scientific advice tells us it comes down to eating well, exercising and getting proper rest, all year-round, for a flu season that won’t take you out of the game.

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Quick-charge EV solution

Picture this — your Volkswagen ID.5 electric vehicle’s 82-kilowatt battery is on empty and your baby needs diapers. The grocery store is too far to walk to and it’s storming outside. Your charge-point speed is 22 kilowatts, which is considered fast but is still going to take eight hours.

Most EV owners don’t wait until the battery is empty to charge, but this scenario is a possibility and those charging stations are big and bulky. But they might not be much longer.

A new study published in IEEE Xplore suggests there’s a better way: a cascaded H-bridge converter that creates multiple DC ports directly, without extra battery banks or bulky, insulated transformer windings.

A low-voltage inter-module transformer that balances power between ports is the key.

That means each charging outlet can operate independently, while the grid still sees a clean, efficient power draw.

A lab prototype showed 95.3 percent efficiency, handled uneven car-charging loads and kept running smoothly even when grid voltage dipped.

As EV sales increase and charging hubs scale up, this design is simpler, trims cost and makes it easier to integrate renewable energy and storage.

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RED ALERT

In 2008-2009, a deadly algae bloom struck the Arabian Gulf. The cluster of Cochlodinium polykrikoides was so large it threatened millions of residents, the ecology of the waterway itself and even national security.

In the years since, smaller blooms, also called red tides or harmful algal blooms, have hit the Gulf region. And warming waters seem to assure that such events will become larger and more frequent in the Middle East and around the world.

Algae aren’t inherently bad, though, says Shady Amin, an associate professor of biology at New York University Abu Dhabi who studies the phenomenon in the UAE and the Gulf of Mexico.

LISTEN TO THIS STORY HERE.

“Algae are actually for the most part good and important,” he tells KUST Review. “Without algae there would not be life on Earth. They make the oxygen we breathe. All the fish we eat is because of algae. There are good blooms that happen in the open ocean. If you go to the North Pacific, for example, very well known spring blooms enrich the food web and that’s how you get whale-watching.”

But bad blooms? The kind fed by warming waters and runoff from human activity like construction and agriculture? They can be catastrophic.

HUMAN HEALTH

Humans don’t even have to be in the water to be harmed by a red tide.

The algae can produce toxins that build up in the food chain, so humans who consume the shellfish and other fish that eat these algae face serious health risks, Amin says. “Not to mention that in areas that have a lot of wave action, a lot of these toxins can get spread into aerosols that people can inhale as they walk across a beach.”

WHEN IS A RED TIDE NOT RED?

Harmful algal blooms are often called red tides, but they can be other colors as well. Read more›››

Some are brown, burgundy, orange, green, yellow or even bioluminescent depending on the pigment of the cells and weather conditions.‹‹‹ Read less

It’s not just walking across a beach that can expose people to these risks. A study in the U.S. state of Florida found a spike in hospital visits involving respiratory distress during red tides.

And some species may not be toxic, but they can still produce irritants that affect skin and eyes. That was the case in 2018 when Abu Dhabi authorities closed local and tourist favorite Saadiyat Beach to swimmers.

ECOSYSTEM DAMAGE

Fish and other marine animals suffer as well. Get a big enough bloom, and the algae consume the oxygen in the water, creating dead zones that suffocate other sea creatures.

Animals not in those dead zones can still be injured or killed, like humans, by consuming fish or shellfish tainted by the algae’s toxins.

The results can be devastating.

The 2008-2009 event off the UAE coast, for example, wiped out thousands of tons of fish and damaged coral reefs, according to researchers who studied it.

And a 2018 red tide left Florida beaches littered with rotting fish, eels, porpoises, turtles and one nearly 8-meter whale shark. Also in Florida the same sort of respiratory problems that affect humans can afflict manatees, a threatened species, sometimes killing them. The toxins can even produce a foam that fatally strips the weatherproofing from seabirds’ feathers.

ECONOMY AND NATIONAL SECURITY

Human industries suffer as well, and not just the fisheries that rely on healthy wild and farmed stocks in the ocean.

In 1995, a C. polykrikoides bloom lasting eight weeks along the entire south coast of Korea resulted in economic losses totaling U.S.$95 million. Refineries and other coastal industries take a hit when blooms clog seawater-intake systems.

Tourism, too, suffers when locations sold as escapes to the sun and the sea become unsafe – and unpleasant – to visit. That 2018 red tide in Florida cost the state about U.S.$2.7 billion in tourism revenues, according to a study from the University of Central Florida.

But the UAE, which relies on desalination plants along its coast to supply most of its population with clean water, faces additional threats if harmful algal blooms force the plants’ closure.

This happened in 2008-2009, when the red tide struck the Arabian Gulf, forcing Gulf Cooperation Council governments to order desalination plants to shut down. The 70 plants in the UAE provide most of the country’s potable water. And this alarms Athol Yates, who keeps an eye on civil-security matters as part of his work at Khalifa University.

“If you shut down the desalination plants, normally you have a supply for a day or two,” he says. “In general, virtually the only water you’ve got is in the water-distribution network, which starts with the desalination plant and ends with your tap.

“Of course, the bulk of that water is not used for drinking purposes but (for things like) watering gardens. If you can get a message out saying, ‘Do not use the water for any other purpose, don’t wash your car,’ it will last longer. But the issue is how long will that message take to get out,” Yates says.

The country has mitigation measures in place, he adds. “The government has built a water network with redundancy, like an electricity network. So if (nuclear power plant) Barakah goes down, you still get electricity from other sources. Same with the water system.”

There is also strategic water storage, Yates says, pointing to a depleted aquifer in Liwa that has been refilled to become a below-ground reservoir. “If bad things happen to the desalination network, they can pump the water there to supply the networks.”

It’s a limited resource, however. And it’s an expensive solution. The Abu Dhabi Water Resources Master Plan estimates that desalination plants’ decreased production during the red tide cost the industry more than U.S.$100,000 (Dh368,000) a day.

GULF CONSIDERATIONS

The UAE and the Gulf have other special concerns when it comes to harmful algal blooms.

For one, Yates points out, the current around the Gulf is particularly slow, meaning a red tide might linger longer.

“These long, slow blooms can shut down the (desalination plants’) intake across a large area,” he says. “When you think about it, the (distance from) Abu Dhabi to Ras Al Khaimah isn’t that long.”

NYU Abu Dhabi’s Amin has seen how long blooms can linger. His team watched “a really nasty bloom” in Abu Dhabi’s Yas Bay for about a year. The source is uncertain, but Amin suspects runoff from construction projects or other human activity.

Amin also notes that the Arabian Gulf in general is highly oligothrophic, meaning it is nutrient-poor.

“We came to realize this very recently,” he says. “What that means is there’s not a huge amount of biomass in the water relative to areas that have a lot more nutrients. So if you have any kind of disturbance of that system, any runoff water, from, say, development or agricultural land or a monsoon, or some kind of weather event, that can really disturb the system and suddenly you get a bloom. These things are highly unpredictable.”

The Gulf also makes observing blooms difficult.

“One of the easiest things that people use is satellite imaging. It’s free. And it’s always there. Unfortunately it doesn’t work here very well because the Arabian Gulf, especially the UAE coast, is extremely shallow,” Amin says.

“Satellites measure light reflected off the Earth. And when you’re trying to approximate if there’s a bloom in a given part of the ocean, you’re measuring the wavelength that’s reflected off the water and there are algorithms that can calculate how much algae is in the water. The problem is that if you have a shallow area, you have also light reflecting off the bottom. It’s much more complicated in that case, and that’s exactly the problem we have here. So relying on satellites here is not an option.”

WATCHING THE WATER

Florida invests heavily in its red-tide defenses, Amin says.

“We work closely with the Gulf of Mexico and the State of Florida. They have a program funded by the state with hundreds if not thousands of state employees that go out almost every day, and they collect water. If it matches a certain threshold that they know a bloom is happening, they alert the public and start taking action.”

The UAE does not yet have these kinds of resources, Amin says, “but we’re making progress.” “That’s what we aim to do.”

Oman, meanwhile, in early 2024 launched a predictive model to help warn of incoming red tides.

An early warning system is indispensable for countries in the region, especially as climate change could make red tides more frequent and deadly, says Jauad el Kharraz, head of research at Muscat-based Middle East Desalination Research Center.

He stresses that further research is vital to evaluate the relationships between red tides, climate change, ocean acidification and human health.

Amin, meanwhile, suggests that we should be looking closer at ourselves. “It’s only because of us overdeveloping our coasts and dumping things in the sea water that leads to these harmful red tides,” he says.

A BETTER FILTER

By: Jade Sterling

High levels of nutrients sounds like a benefit to an ecosystem, but when an environment receives too many nutrients, otherwise known as eutrophication, algal blooms and hypoxic waters can kill fish and seagrass.

“The high accumulation of nutrients, including nitrogen and phosphorus, discharged into surface water, rivers and reservoirs can accelerate eutrophication and cause great damage to the aquatic ecosystem,” says Shadi Hasan, director of the Center for Membranes and Advanced Water Technology at Khalifa University.“We need to control the levels of nutrients and develop innovative technologies to treat water and remove excess nutrients.”

Novel membrane technology, however, may be the solution. Hasan’s KU research team has developed a composite polylactic acid (PLA) and nanomaterial membrane to remove nutrients from wastewater.

Treatment technologies already exist. However, chemical methods can introduce undesirable byproducts; and biological treatments take much longer and are inefficient in the use of nitrogen. Additionally, no available method offers complete water purification.

The membrane works via adsorption. The research team used a functionalized positively charged multi-walled carbon nanotube/graphene oxide hybrid nanomaterial to remove nitrogen (as ammonia) and phosphorus from wastewater while enhancing water permeability. The nutrients are filtered out by collecting in the pores of the nanotubes at the surface of the membrane.

But such a membrane needs to offer water permeability. As more nutrients adsorb and collect, the amount of water passing through decreases. The research team’s membrane, however, offers high water flux even when filtering the nutrients.

The carbon nanotubes increase membrane tensile strength significantly, while the graphene oxide enhances thermal stability and tensile strength and provides antibacterial properties. This supports water flux and provides hydrophilicity to the end product.

While the effects of graphene oxide and carbon nanotubes in water purification are well-documented, studies are limited when it comes to combining the two as a nanohybrid.

“After a comprehensive review of the literature, our research group is the first to report the fabrication of such composite PLA membranes for the removal of nutrients from synthetic and real wastewater,” says Hasan, who adds that the team is investigating ways to scale up the membranes for larger applications.acknowledges, or even knows.

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