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Contrails, take a hike

When you’re looking up at the sky to observe the jet you heard flying overhead, you’ll often notice the wispy, white lines it leaves behind. What you may not know is that those white lines, known as contrails, are aviation’s biggest contributor to climate damage. The good news is that fixing it might be simple.

A new study published in Nature Communications indicates that making small detours around parts of the sky where those contrails form could be the solution.

Smarter flight paths may make the flights slightly longer, which uses more fuel, but it’s only minimal. The tradeoff: There will be far less heat trapped without the contrails.

Under the Paris Agreement, the world aims to keep the global temperature increase under 1.5 degrees, pre-industrial revolution, 2 degrees at the most. But we’ve already spent far too much of that allowance and we will soon be over target.

If we get started soon (by at least 2035), we could save 9 percent of the remaining budget by 2050. This means instead of reducing emissions, we stop adding heat right now.

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AI builds super-charged proteins

Scientists at the University of Illinois have made it possible to command a computer to enhance a protein and a robot does all the work — no PhD needed. This new system mixes artificial intelligence with lab automation.

In a recent study, published in Nature Communications, researchers showed off a robotic setup that takes a protein’s fundamental makeup, experiments with hundreds of tiny tweaks and finds the best-performing version without any human stepping in to decide what to try next. The result is enzymes that work significantly better than before.

The team succeeded in boosting one plant enzyme’s ability to pick the right chemical by 90 times and made it 16 times faster at completing its job. They also upgraded a bacterial enzyme to work 26 times better at a pH level important for animal feed, potentially helping farmers and food producers.

The ease of the platform’s use is highly notable as it was trained to predict useful changes and could easily be operated by a layperson with simple, plain English commands. The testing, planning and analysis are all taken care of inside a modular robotic lab.

This could accelerate methods of creating better medicines, greener chemicals and more efficient industrial processes as protein design can be as simple as giving a computer a task.

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Immune cell sabotage

Antibiotic resistance, a specific type of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), is a growing global health concern. This occurs when bacteria develop resistance to the antibiotics created to kill them.

As antibiotic resistance grows, viruses called bacteriophages that are used to attack bacteria are making their mark as a new method of fighting infections.

The problem is alveolar macrophages, immune cells in the lungs, clean up these viruses before they can do their job.

A group of researchers in Paris, France recently discovered that in mice with complicated lung infections in which the macrophages were active, the phages were gone quickly and the infections remained. But in the mice without the immune cells, the phages were able to completely wipe out the bacteria.

This demonstrates that though microphages help to fight infection, they can also sabotage phage therapy by eliminating helpful viruses.

The paper, published in Nature Communications, says strategies are needed to work around these immune cells in order for phage treatments to succeed against drug-resistant lung infections.

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A new type of brain cell identified
for object permanence

Not all memory functions are handled by the same type of neuron. Research published in Nature Communications identified a previously unknown class of neuron in the hippocampus, the region known as the brain’s memory center, that is dedicated solely to object memory.

“Ovoid” neurons, named for their shape, were found to play a crucial role in recognizing objects over both short and long time periods. Unlike the pyramidal neurons that process spatial information like remembering a location, ovoid neurons activate only when encountering new objects and are silent when seeing familiar objects, even months later.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia used a technique that allows neurons to be activated or silenced with light in mice trained in an object-recognition task. When ovoid neurons were silenced, mice were unable to recognize objects they had previously seen, effectively “erasing” object memories. When the ovoid neurons were artificially activated, mice showed a strong preference for familiar objects.

This discovery challenges the long-held belief that the hippocampus flexibly encodes both spatial and non-spatial information. Instead, the brain appears to have separate, specialized circuits for different types of memory. This could have profound implications for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, where memory loss often affects object recognition before spatial memory.

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Air pollution impairs cognitive
function

Breathing polluted air can impair cognitive function within just four hours, according to a new study published in Nature Communications.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham and University of Manchester found that short-term exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) significantly reduces selective attention and the ability to recognize emotions. The findings suggest that even brief encounters with air pollution can affect higher-level brain functions.

The study tested 26 adults under controlled conditions, exposing them to either clean air or high levels of particulate pollution for one hour. Cognitive tests before and after exposure showed that participants had more difficulty focusing and interpreting facial expressions after breathing polluted air.

The researchers highlighted the need for further research into PM2.5 and its effects on brain health, especially long-term.