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A plant’s secret weapon

The α-amylase inhibitor is a natural protein in plants that blocks an insect’s ability to digest starch — the yummy main source of energy many grain-eating bugs seek when devouring a mass-produced crop like corn.

When plants slip this inhibitor into the pest’s tissues, its digestive enzymes get jammed and the bug is left with a belly full of starch it can’t use.

A new review published in Biotechnology Journals explores how different plants create these inhibitors, the precision at which they can target insect enzymes and how scientists have attempted boosting them in crops.

Early trials showed promise, but there are public and regulatory obstacles to using the usual genetically modified organisms.

Now researchers are exploring how gene editing to refine a plant’s natural inhibitor genes might enhance its natural defense systems without foreign DNA additions.

If successful, it could result in less dependence on chemical insecticides, protect stored grains and contribute to more sustainable farming practices.

Before this gene editing happens, however, further research is required to ensure safety for humans, livestock and insects that provide positive impacts on crops. Researchers also need to make sure the pests they’re aimed at don’t evolve their way around the inhibitors.

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The many faces of Botox

When we hear the term Botox or see it advertised, it’s usually tied to smoothing out facial wrinkles or keeping them at bay. But while beauty drives most of the market, that’s only part of the story. A range of important medical treatments also rely on Botox — and none of them has anything to do with chasing youth.

In 2024 alone, more than 9 million treatments were performed worldwide — up more than 26 percent since 2021. Close to 85 percent of users were women with an average age of 43. The number of men using Botox is also on the rise and is expected to reach 17 percent in 2025, up from 12.3 percent in 2018.

American ophthalmologist Alan Scott first used botulinum toxin A, a neurotoxin produced by a bacterium called Clostridium botulinum (brand name Botox) as an alternative to surgery, to weaken hyperactive eye muscles by paralyzing muscles and blocking specific nerves.

Scott had no idea how versatile the drug, then called Oculinum, would become in the field of medicine when he sold the rights to Allergan in 1991 for U.S.$4.5 million. At that time, it was used for uncontrollable blinking and misaligned eyes. Now worth billions, Botox is continually proving itself with a growing list of applications.

Like migraines that stop people in their tracks, preventing them from completing even the most basic daily tasks. These headaches impact more than a billion people worldwide every year.

Botox treatment was FDA approved for migraine treatment in 2010.

Injections are strategically placed around the head and neck areas to interrupt the pathway of pain connecting the central nervous system in the brain and spinal cord nerves. The neurotransmitters and molecules released during a migraine are interrupted by the botulinum toxin where the nerves and muscles connect.

This has been proven effective in those who suffer with chronic migraines, which means 15 plus headaches per month for a minimum of three months. It’s not for everyone, though. Users must be 18 years or older. It also doesn’t eliminate the headaches altogether but reduces the frequency by about 50 percent.

Botox is also used in patients with muscle spasticity, which can be the result of neurological disorders like stroke or cerebral palsy that cause damage to the brain, spinal cord or nerves that control muscle movement. Damage to the nervous system causes muscle stiffness or muscles to move involuntarily, because wrong orders are being delivered.

For those living with spasticity, relaxing the muscles means less stiffness in the muscles and improved range of motion.

– Francois Bethoux, rehabilitation specialist-Cleveland Clinic

And if you’re a sweaty person, even when you shouldn’t be, Botox could be your new best friend.

Overactive sweat glands, a condition called hyperhidrosis, can cause profuse sweating, creating uncomfortable and often embarrassing scenarios.

Like many of the other conditions mentioned above, there is a surgical option — have those sweaty glands removed — but bodies need sweat to regulate body temperature, just not so much of it.

Botox injections to a localized site can block the signals that activate those overactive glands. This means your body’s sweat glands can continue to operate to cool you, without excess. The treatment takes about two weeks for maximum impact and can offer reduced underarm sweating by up to 90 percent.

This treatment can be applied to those with overactive bladders as well. This doesn’t mean that a little urine escapes when you sneeze — that would be considered stress incontinence. If your bladder is overactive, you might feel a sudden urge to urinate and struggle to control it or experience frequent urination day and night.

Good news: “A urologist can inject Botox into your bladder to treat urge incontinence or overactive bladder. This helps the muscles relax, which will give you more time to get to the bathroom when you feel the need to urinate,” according to the Mayo Clinic. Botox relaxes the bladder muscle to limit contraction.

This treatment can help the 17 percent of women and 3 to 11 percent of men who struggle with urge incontinence.

While these treatments are FDA approved, further uses in other off-label applications are sometimes approved on a case-by-case basis by the regulating body.

One of which is chronic pain.

It was once thought that these injections solely blocked the signals sent by nerves to the muscles, but new research tells us that’s not the only function — they also affect the electrical activity inside the nerves by calming overactive nerves.

Studies show that Botox reduces some nerve-related pain. In conditions like phantom limb pain, nerve damage pain and allodynia (when something that shouldn’t hurt hurts), tiny Botox injections result in the nerves becoming less sensitive.

So those things that shouldn’t hurt did so less, and it took more stimulus for those patients to feel pain.

A 2024 review published in Toxins discusses future potential applications, and it seems while Botox has come a long way, there’s still a ways to go.

The product is being redesigned by mixing and matching the modules and modifying its parts to create versions that work faster and last longer, don’t cause muscle paralysis and go only to the nerves that cause pain. Researchers are also studying new ways to administer the medication other than an injection.

Smart Botox is en route with products like microneedle patches, slow-release gels, light-activated nanoparticles that can be switched on only when required and gene-delivery approaches that make cells produce tiny amounts of the active Botox part over time.

These applications are only in their infancy and hopefully will be available before we get too wrinkly, but big picture, classic Botox (BoNT/A and BoNT/B) is in the process of becoming more precise, predictable, longer and faster acting, less paralytic and potentially needle-free.

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Thirsty? Science hops to it

A changing climate is putting more pressure on the world’s supply of clean water. But an amphibian might have the answer.

A team of researchers at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has developed a material that harvests atmospheric water more efficiently than current technologies. And it’s all thanks to a frog.

Listen to the Deep Dive:

Frogs don’t consume food and water the way we do. Food is taken in orally, but the eyeballs fall inward to push it down the throat. Water, however, is absorbed through their skin.

It was this process that inspired a new ultra-absorbent material that came exclusively from studying hydrogels. The gels create a barrier that keeps out contaminants but allows water to pass through.

CAPTION: Jeremy Cho, assistant professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering
IMAGE: University of Nevada, Las Vegas

“A hydrogel is a soft polymeric material that can swell with water, meaning it is very permeable to water, just like skins in organisms,” says Jeremy Cho, one of the researchers on the team.

A hydrogen membrane and a liquid desiccant was the winning combination that permits rapid capture and large quantity storage for freshwater distillation.

“We observed that it could capture water at incredibly fast rates. We captured two to six liters per day per square meter of membrane area in Las Vegas air — the driest city in the United States,” Cho says.

The liquid desiccant attracts water and absorbs water vapor from the air, even when the relative humidity is as low as 10 percent.

The most challenging obstacle was to filter outside air particulates and contaminants. A hydrogel membrane was added between the desiccant and the air.

It sounds like an easy solution, but finding the just-right hydrogel took two years of experimentation resulting in two published papers. “It took a lot of careful hydrogel synthesis and experimentation to verify our theory,” he tells KUST Review.

| What’s new?

Though atmospheric water harvesting processes have been around for a long time, often repackaging old technologies, the team’s method is based on new tech.

“Our work is different in that we are not creating a new sorbent to be cycled, or relying on an old tech developed for a different application. We are presenting a new membrane-based method where water can be continuously captured into a liquid desiccant and released (distilled) in another location.

The segregation of processes is what’s key here as it allows you to separately optimize and control each process for better overall performance and efficiency. It gives us flexibility in how we can design a complete water-harvesting system. If we want to be solar or waste-heat or electrically powered, we can build different systems that still rely on the same membrane-based capture approach developed because of this flexibility,” Cho says.

| It’s not just for drinking

The majority of the market is focused on drinking water, which is only a fragment of overall water consumption, so the team initiated a start-up company with hopes its tech has a massive impact on sustainability and water sourcing.

Cho adds, “This approach was invented with water-stressed arid regions in mind, and sustainability has been part of the vision from the very beginning.”

This includes considering the current level of water stress and how their tech can impact water usage, conservation and regulation. Regulators are consistently looking toward lower consumption and water reclamation, and companies that look to environmental, social and governance factors when making investment calls are seeking to be water-neutral or water-positive.

Regulators in Nevada sometimes try to put off businesses from setting up there, based on their water-consumption forecasting. Cho and his team are hoping to eliminate this market barrier, enhancing the local economy.

| At what cost?

The problem is that these water solutions are more costly than tap water, but Cho says his team’s goal is to ensure their start-up company, WAVR Technologies, is focused on developing solutions to supply water to make up for these consumptive losses.

| Who is willing to pay the price?

Cho says there are many industries in Las Vegas looking for solutions, including real estate, hospitality, construction and high-tech manufacturing. “We’ve been talking to them, they’re all looking for a solution and are willing to pay for it. And from what we can tell right now, the amount they’re willing to pay seems to be achievable from a technoeconomic standpoint when we scale up our technology.”

“Climate change is real, and whether or not you accept the science that we are causing it, you are paying for it. In arid regions, it is extremely visible through our water resources, our utility bills, and our abilities to do business and live in our communities. We should be more responsible in how we use our water and do what we can to reclaim it. And whatever water we cannot reclaim, let’s consider sourcing that from the air—a hidden resource that surrounds us all,” Cho tells KUST Review.

The team at WAVR Technologies expects its first prototype to be ready by the end of 2025.

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The secret to healthy aging?

Everyone ages. Some of us live to a ripe old age, and many fight the process with anti-aging products. But the important thing is what we’re doing to make sure when we age, we do so well.

That doesn’t necessarily mean what it looks like to age on the outside, it’s also important to make sure our insides are taken care of. This secret may lie with the bowhead whale.

A team of researchers from New York have discovered that these Arctic giants have extremely efficient DNA-repair systems, which could explain their 200-year lifespans and cancer resistance.

For many years, scientists have hypothesized how such enormous animals avoid the health problems that seem to plague humans.

New research published in Nature offers an intriguing answer and it’s all about DNA repair.

Instead of having extra cancer-fighting genes, bowhead whales seem to have a built-in “genome maintenance crew” that keeps their DNA in tip top shape. Their cells fix broken DNA more precisely and quicker than ours, reducing errors that can lead to cancer or aging.

The star of this show is a protein called CIRBP (cold-inducible RNA-binding protein). Bowhead whales have it in spades, which isn’t surprising considering the climate of the Arctic homes. This protein improves the cell’s ability to fix DNA breaks and maintain chromosome stability.

When scientists introduced the protein into human cells and into fruit flies, it boosted DNA repair, slowed tumor growth and extended the lifespan.

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NATURE’S
COOL IDEAS

While we can’t grow larger ears like the desert fox or elephant to radiate heat, we could learn from nature to solve some of the problems of a warming world.

Here are five ways nature has inspired methods to beat the heat.

From beetle to ultra-
white ceramic

Basic physics tells us that lighter colors absorb less light than darker ones, and therefore remain cooler. While ultra-white paints exist and reflect over 95 percent of the sunlight that hits them, regular paint suffers from durability issues when exposed to the elements on the outside of buildings.

Researchers at City University of Hong Kong developed a passive radiative cooling ceramic that can drastically cool buildings by reflecting sunlight and heat. The ceramic makes it tough and hardy, and the team says it should be relatively easy to scale up for mass production.

“Our work on cooling ceramic takes inspiration from the bio-whiteness observed in the whitest beetle,” lead author Zuankai Wang says.

“Nature offers us an abundance of intricate designs, efficient systems and sustainable solutions that have evolved over millions of years.”

The ceramic is based on the exoskeleton of the Cyphochilus, a genus of beetles with unusually bright white scales. The filaments that make the scales are just a few micrometers thick and tightly packed, which scatters almost the entire spectrum of light efficiently. Copying this structure allows the team’s ceramic to achieve a solar reflectivity of 99.6 percent.

Termites invented
air conditioning

If you compare the height of some of the biggest mounds with the termites that build them, it would be the equivalent of four Burj Khalifas stacked on top of each other compared with humans.

Much like the Burj Khalifa would be unbearable in the desert heat without air conditioning, so too would the termite mound. To combat this, the insects build a series of air pockets throughout, creating ventilation via convection.

A shopping mall in central Harare, Zimbabwe, copied the design of a termite mound in its architecture to develop a self-cooling system. The Eastgate Center has no conventional air-conditioning or heating systems and uses less than 10 percent of the energy of a conventional building the same size. As termites constantly open and close a series of heating and cooling vents in the mounds throughout the course of the day, so too does the Eastgate Center as outside air is drawn in through vertical ducts on the first floor and either warmed or cooled by the building mass depending on which is hotter, the concrete or the air.

Petal to
the metal

Anna Laura Pisello, University of Peurgia, Italy, thought the botanical world might offer solutions toward mitigating urban heat island effects.

“We first discovered several similarities between building systems and botanical systems, in particular flowers,” Pisello says. “Galanthus nivalus is a bell-shaped ‘hanging flower’ with white oblong flowers that bend to the ground.”

Pisello says urban geometry plays a particular role in establishing energy consumption and heating and cooling. The denser an area, the hotter it gets.

Flowers and their pollinators benefit from the warm air in the center of the flower, an observation at odds with the experience of residents in an urban heat island at the center of a city, but a study in light-colored flowers found that Galanthus nivalus exhibits a cooling effect. Infrared cameras showed a uniform temperature across the flower of 2.7 degrees lower than ambient. While researchers aren’t sure why this happens, the directional reflective property of the petals has been suggested as a possible contributor.

“A building envelope (all the building components that separate the indoors from the outdoors) is similar to flower petals,” Pisello says.

“Buildings surrounded by buildings in close proximity are like the layout of petals and building occupants interact in and among buildings, while pollinators forage inside flowers.”

Pisello thinks these flowers may have microstructures in the petals that reflect solar radiation out and keep the intra-floral area cool. When she took a picture of the flower, she observed a shiny lighting effect across the curving flower petals from the camera flash and says materials with such optical features could be possible solutions for building applications.

Copy the
chameleon

“Architects spend a lot of time and effort trying to solve their design problems. Actually, they just need to look at and learn from the surrounding environment,” says Yasmin Eid of Sinai University.

In looking at biomimicry, she points to the hexagonal-shaped building façade that drew inspiration from the chameleon and took first place in a competition for a mixed-use office building in Dubai.

Designed by Wanders Werner Falasi consulting architects, the building’s façade is made of hexagons that mechanically adapt to the sun’s trajectory. If they get too hot, they close. Each hexagon has fixed solar nano-cells in the exterior walls that collect sunlight during the day.

Any energy that isn’t used to run the building during the day is used to illuminate thousands of LEDs at night, like a chameleon changing color.

After all, chameleons don’t change color due to their mood, but for thermoregulation and camouflage. Eid says the chameleon can avoid about 45 percent of sun rays simply by changing colors. The cells in the skin that can do this are called chromatophores and are roughly hexagon-shaped, inspiring the hexagon façade of the Dubai office building.

Forestation to
fenestration

Mark Edward Alston’s research draws inspiration from trees and natural systems to improve glass building materials.

Specifically, the University of Salford Manchester researcher’s work focuses on designing intelligent glass surfaces that can manage solar absorbance and fluidic conductivity for better energy management, in a similar way that tree leaves manage sunlight.

His composite glass material absorbs solar energy to reduce heat gain inside buildings in the same way leaves absorb sunlight for photosynthesis but minimize the heat absorbed.

An adaptive layer in the glass dynamically adjusts to different environmental conditions to maximize efficiency.

Just as plants use a vascular system to distribute nutrients and water, the glass uses a fluidic network to manage heat, circulating a cooling fluid in real time based on the external temperature and sunlight intensity.

His approach aims to transform building facades into more adaptive and responsive energy systems, mirroring the multifunctional and self-regulating properties of trees.

“To truly create pioneering smart cities, at the forefront of low carbon production, could we embrace new bio-inspired technology solutions?” Alston asks. “These principles to actively manage the surface temperature of glass could change our buildings into climate modifiers and contribute to city resilience in an increasingly unpredictable climatic world.”

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