It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, January 12, 2024
Innovating Wastewater Treatment: A Leap from Experience to Intelligence
In a recent study published online 18 December 2023 in the journal Environmental Science and Ecotechnology, scientists from Peking University introduced a groundbreaking Global WWTP Microbiome-based Integrative Information Platform to address the escalating complexities of pollutants and inadequacies in traditional WWTPs. This platform, inspired by the advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), is poised to revolutionize the field of environmental engineering and microbiome research.
The innovative platform harnesses extensive microbiome and engineering data from WWTPs around the world. By utilizing advanced AI-driven tools, it analyzes the data to identify optimal microbiomes, upgrade facilities, and effectively respond to pollution accidents. This AI-driven platform strives for a stronger, faster, and globally integrated wastewater treatment solution, thereby enhancing WWTPs' indispensable role in pollution control and environmental sustainability.
Highlights
A “Global WWTP Microbiome-based Integrative Information Platform” is proposed.
The Platform employs AI-driven modeling and analyzing for WWTP-relevant parties.
The Platform aims to enhance the biodegradation efficiency of pollutants on Earth.
The Platform will be of significance for our human society and natural environment.
"The Global WWTP Microbiome-based Integrative Information Platform is not just a technological advancement; it's a paradigm shift in how we cope with environmental challenges," stated Donghui Wen, a leading figure in environmental engineering. "By harnessing the power of AI and global data, we're moving from mere experience-based methods to an era of informed intelligence."
The implications of this platform are vast. It is expected to significantly enhance the performance of WWTPs in pollution control, contributing to a more harmonious and healthy future for human society and the natural environment. It supports multidisciplinary research, documents microbial evolution, advances wastewater-based epidemiology, and enhances global resource sharing.
Environmental Science and Ecotechnology (ISSN 2666-4984) is an international, peer-reviewed, and open-access journal published by Elsevier. The journal publishes significant views and research across the full spectrum of ecology and environmental sciences, such as climate change, sustainability, biodiversity conservation, environment & health, green catalysis/processing for pollution control, and AI-driven environmental engineering. The latest impact factor of ESE is 12.6, according to the Journal Citation ReportTM 2022.
The impact of global warming and harmful human activities has led to the rise of "sustainability" as a solution to environmental challenges. Central to this is Green Entrepreneurship (GE), which combines innovation and environmental commitment in business practices. GE is crucial for addressing environmental challenges, with green entrepreneurs prioritizing environmental and social value. This approach is driven by personal environmental values and personality traits.
In a compelling study published on 20 November 2023 in Entrepreneurship Education, researchers delve into the various factors that drive green entrepreneurial intentions among undergraduate students in an emerging economy. The study highlights the role of Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) in fostering this mindset among students, who are key to sustainable business practices.
The study takes a deep dive into the dynamics of environmental entrepreneurship among undergraduates, applying theoretical frameworks such as the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), Flow Theory (FT), and Generational Theory (GT). It examines how their attitude toward entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial knowledge and motivation, proactiveness for entrepreneurship (as a personality trait), and their environmental values interact with the support provided by universities to shape their green entrepreneurial intentions. The study integrates theories like the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), Flow Theory (FT), and Generational Theory (GT) to develop a comprehensive understanding of the variables influencing these intentions.
Sanjoy Kumar Roy, the study's lead researcher, emphasizes the critical role of nurturing green entrepreneurial mindsets among young adults, particularly in addressing environmental challenges through innovative business ventures. This research underscores the critical importance of education and supportive ecosystems in cultivating green entrepreneurial intentions among students, advocating for a comprehensive approach to instill sustainable business practices in emerging economies.
The study offers invaluable insights for educational institutions and policymakers, guiding them in shaping strategies that nurture environmentally sustainable business mindsets in future entrepreneurs. Furthermore, the study highlights the necessity for further research in diverse cultural contexts to broaden the global understanding of green entrepreneurial intentions and to develop effective strategies that foster sustainable entrepreneurship on a worldwide scale.
Entrepreneurship Education is dedicated to exchanging the latest academic research and practical findings on various aspects of entrepreneurship education. It serves as a forum for the exchange of ideas among academic researchers, policy makers, and entrepreneurs, in order to explore practical experience and summarize theoretical reflections. The journal draws on high-quality work in social sciences, particularly in education, with an interdisciplinary and peer-reviewed approach. The journal primarily focuses on entrepreneurship education with a wide spectrum of sub-fields such as innovative education, technical and vocational education and training, maker education, lifelong learning and skill development, social entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial universities, curriculum and instruction, policy and governance. We welcome original research, review article, book review, and other types of manuscripts based on the method of international and comparison, policy analysis, case study, quantitative and qualitative study, etc.
Factors influencing undergraduate students’ green entrepreneurial intentions: evidence from an emerging economy
Core-shell ‘chemical looping’ boosts efficiency of greener approach to ethylene production
Multi-university team, including researchers from Lehigh University, reports catalysis breakthrough that could support oxidative coupling of methane (OCM) as an economically viable, more sustainable method for producing the essential chemical feedstock
ISRAEL WACHS IS G. WHITNEY SNYDER PROFESSOR OF CHEMICAL AND BIOMOLECULAR ENGINEERING AND DIRECTOR OF THE OPERANDO MOLECULAR SPECTROSCOPY AND CATALYSIS RESEARCH LAB AT LEHIGH UNIVERSITY.
Ethylene is sometimes called the most important chemical in the petrochemical industry because it serves as the feedstock for a huge range of everyday products. It’s used in the production of antifreeze, vinyl, synthetic rubber, foam insulation, and plastics of all kinds.
Currently, ethylene is produced through an energy- and resource-intensive process called steam cracking, where extremes of temperature and pressure produce ethylene from crude oil in the presence of steam—and in the process, emit tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Another way in which ethylene can be produced, however, is through a process called oxidative coupling of methane (OCM). It has the potential to be a greener alternative to steam cracking, but until recently, the amount of ethylene it yields did not make the process economically viable.
“So far, the catalytic yield has been below 30 percent for a single pass, meaning just passing the methane and oxygen through the catalyst and getting ethylene on the other side,” says Bar Mosevitzky Lis, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in Lehigh University’s P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science. “Studies that have simulated the entire industrial process using OCM have shown that the technology doesn’t become profitable until the single pass yield reaches between 30 and 35 percent.”
OCM is now one step closer to leaving the lab and entering the real world. For the first time, researchers at North Carolina State University (NCSU) and Lehigh University, in collaboration with researchers from the Guangzhou Institute of Energy Conversion and the East China University of Science and Technology, have developed an OCM catalyst that exceeds 30 percent when it comes to the production of ethylene. The paper describing their breakthrough was recently published in Nature Communications.
The collaboration was led by Fanxing Li, Alcoa Professor of Engineering at NCSU. His team developed a class of core-shell Li2CO3-coated mixed rare earth oxides as catalysts for the oxidative coupling of methane using a chemical looping scheme. The result was a single-pass yield of up to 30.6 percent.
“The idea with chemical looping is that instead of doing a co-feed of methane and oxygen into the chamber with the catalyst, you do it sequentially,” says Mosevitzky Lis, who is also one of the study’s coauthors. “Over time, you lose oxygen from the catalyst and it becomes ineffective. With chemical looping, you start with methane, then switch to oxygen, then back to methane, and the oxygen serves to continually reoxidize the catalyst, thereby replenishing its ability to provide oxygen for the reaction.”
“Our specialization is with in situ surface characterization,” says Mosevitzky Lis, “meaning we characterize the surface of catalysts while the reaction is running. We apply a wide array of physical and chemical techniques to understand the transformations catalysts undergo while the catalytic reaction is running on their surface and how these transformations relate to what makes them such good catalysts.”
He says the catalyst is composed from a mixed oxide core covered by lithium carbonate, and it’s the interaction between the core and the shell during chemical looping that is responsible for the high yield. The results mean that, for the first time, upgrading methane—which can be found in natural gas and biogas—into ethylene could be within reach for industry.
“OCM has the potential to be cheaper and more efficient when it comes to energy and emissions,” he says. “Plus, instead of using crude oil, you’re using methane that typically comes from natural gas but may also be generated in the future from biogas and the electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide. And once you have ethylene, you’re able to transform it into countless products that are used by the whole world.”
The next step is to determine the suitability of the catalyst for industrial scale production while trying to push the yield even further up. For now, however, having finally improved on a method that’s remained an unfulfilled promise since the 1980s marks a milestone.
“The intricacy of the system and the dynamics that take place, it’s almost like art,” says Mosevitzky Lis. “Both the core and the shell of the catalyst undergo very extreme processes, generating all kinds of interesting things on the surface. It’s beautiful.”
CREDIT: ANTHONY BURNETTI, GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
You may be familiar with yeast as the organism content to turn carbs into products like bread and beer when left to ferment in the dark. In these cases, exposure to light can hinder or even spoil the process.
In a new study published in Current Biology, researchers in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences have engineered one of the world’s first strains of yeast that may be happier with the lights on.
“We were frankly shocked by how simple it was to turn the yeast into phototrophs (organisms that can harness and use energy from light),” says Anthony Burnetti, a research scientist working in Associate Professor William Ratcliff’s laboratory and corresponding author of the study. “All we needed to do was move a single gene, and they grew 2% faster in the light than in the dark. Without any fine-tuning or careful coaxing, it just worked.”
Easily equipping the yeast with such an evolutionarily important trait could mean big things for our understanding of how this trait originated — and how it can be used to study things like biofuel production, evolution, and cellular aging.
Looking for an energy boost
The research was inspired by the group’s past work investigating the evolution of multicellular life. The group published their first report on their Multicellularity Long-Term Evolution Experiment (MuLTEE) in Nature last year, uncovering how their single-celled model organism, “snowflake yeast,” was able to evolve multicellularity over 3,000 generations.
Throughout these evolution experiments, one major limitation for multicellular evolution appeared: energy.
“Oxygen has a hard time diffusing deep into tissues, and you get tissues without the ability to get energy as a result,” says Burnetti. “I was looking for ways to get around this oxygen-based energy limitation.”
One way to give organisms an energy boost without using oxygen is through light. But the ability to turn light into usable energy can be complicated from an evolutionary standpoint. For example, the molecular machinery that allows plants to use light for energy involves a host of genes and proteins that are hard to synthesize and transfer to other organisms — both in the lab and naturally through evolution.
Luckily, plants are not the only organisms that can convert light to energy.
Keeping it simple
A simpler way for organisms to use light is with rhodopsins: proteins that can convert light into energy without additional cellular machinery.
“Rhodopsins are found all over the tree of life and apparently are acquired by organisms obtaining genes from each other over evolutionary time,” says Autumn Peterson, a biology Ph.D. student working with Ratcliff and lead author of the study.
This type of genetic exchange is called horizontal gene transfer and involves sharing genetic information between organisms that aren’t closely related. Horizontal gene transfer can cause seemingly big evolutionary jumps in a short time, like how bacteria are quickly able to develop resistance to certain antibiotics. This can happen with all kinds of genetic information and is particularly common with rhodopsin proteins.
“In the process of figuring out a way to get rhodopsins into multi-celled yeast,” explains Burnetti, “we found we could learn about horizontal transfer of rhodopsins that has occurred across evolution in the past by transferring it into regular, single-celled yeast where it has never been before.”
To see if they could outfit a single-celled organism with solar-powered rhodopsin, researchers added a rhodopsin gene synthesized from a parasitic fungus to common baker’s yeast. This specific gene is coded for a form of rhodopsin that would be inserted into the cell’s vacuole, a part of the cell that, like mitochondria, can turn chemical gradients made by proteins like rhodopsin into energy.
Biology Ph.D. student Autumn Peterson, the study's lead author, looks at yeast cells with Research Scientist Anthony Burnetti, the study's corresponding author, in the lab.
Georgia Tech biology researchers who worked on the study include (from left to right) School of Biological Sciences Assistant Professor William Ratcliff, Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection grant writer Carina Baskett, biology Ph.D. student Autumn Peterson (lead author), and Research Scientist Anthony Burnetti (corresponding author).
CREDIT
Audra Davidson, Georgia Institute of Technology
Equipped with vacuolar rhodopsin, the yeast grew roughly 2% faster when lit — a huge benefit in terms of evolution.
“Here we have a single gene, and we're just yanking it across contexts into a lineage that's never been a phototroph before, and it just works,” says Burnetti. “This says that it really is that easy for this kind of a system, at least sometimes, to do its job in a new organism.”
This simplicity provides key evolutionary insights and says a lot about “the ease with which rhodopsins have been able to spread across so many lineages and why that may be so,” explains Peterson, who Peterson recently received a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Gilliam Fellowship for her work. Carina Baskett, grant writer for Georgia Tech’s Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection, also worked on the study.
Because vacuolar function may contribute to cellular aging, the group has also initiated collaborations to study how rhodopsins may be able to reduce aging effects in the yeast. Other researchers are already starting to use similar new, solar-powered yeast to study advancing bioproduction, which could mark big improvements for things like synthesizing biofuels.
Ratcliff and his group, however, are mostly keen to explore how this added benefit could impact the single-celled yeast’s journey to a multicellular organism.
“We have this beautiful model system of simple multicellularity,” says Burnetti, referring to the long-running Multicellularity Long-Term Evolution Experiment (MuLTEE). “We want to give it phototrophy and see how it changes its evolution.”
Citation: Peterson et al., 2024, Current Biology 34, 1–7.
RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- Size does not matter. Certainly not when it comes to tiny worms securing the attention of biologists. One such biologist, Morris F. Maduro at the University of California, Riverside, has just been awarded a grant of nearly $1.3 million from the National Science Foundation, or NSF, to study a worm (or nematode) about a millimeter in length.
The research project will focus on the gut of Pristionchus pacificus. Like most nematodes, P. pacificus develops quickly, its growth from embryo to adult taking just four days. It is a complete animal, with a nervous system, skin, intestine, and muscles. Nematodes of the genus Pristionchus are a distant relative of the well-studied species Caenorhabditis elegans, used by biologists as a model organism to study animal development and behavior.
Funded for four years, the research project will focus on changes in the gene network that specify the early intestinal precursor cells in nematodes like P. pacificus. Gene networks describe how genes turn each other on and off. Precursor cells are stem cells that can differentiate — or specialize — into only one cell type.
“During embryonic development, gene networks cause cells to develop along pathways of differentiation, resulting in cells becoming specialized in their function,” said Maduro, a professor of molecular, cell and systems biology who has studied nematodes for more than two decades. “Changes in such networks occur over evolutionary time and in human disease. For more than 25 years, gut specification was studied in only a single species, C. elegans, and its close relatives. The NSF grant will allow us to extend our work into the genus Pristionchus.”
P. pacificus is usually found in association with a species of scarab beetle, while C. elegans is free-living and usually found on rotting fruit. P. pacificus has some adaptations, such as a mouth with a little tooth for eating the corpses of dead beetles. As a result, P. pacificus can attack other nematodes and is more predatory than C. elegans. C. elegans tends to eat mostly bacteria and fungi.
“Pristionchus embryos look a like those of C. elegans,” Maduro said. “But even when the phenotype, the outward form of the animal, doesn’t change, the genes behind the scenes can still change. This phenomenon is called developmental system drift, paralleling the term genetic drift. Entire sets of genes can change while their overall function does not. In other words, the endpoint, whether it’s C. elegans or P. pacificus or another nematode species, still looks like a nematode. This means Pristionchus makes its gut in a different way than C. elegans. This idea that genes change when the phenotype looks the same among species is probably quite widespread.”
Photo shows Pristionchus worms. An adult is about 1 millimeter long.
CREDIT
Maduro lab, UC Riverside.
Eric S. Haag, a professor of biology at the University of Maryland who will not be participating in the research project, said he is excited to learn more about Maduro’s work.
“Biologists have long sought to understand how new features of animal bodies get encoded by new genomic instructions. But we now know that even the genes that construct ancient traits still undergo evolutionary changes,” Haag said. “Dr. Maduro’s work uses a very manipulable type of nematode to explore this paradoxical fact. Within a group of worms with very similar digestive systems, some species have re-invented the genetic circuits that control their development. It’s so surprising, and I can’t wait to learn about what they find.”
Maduro explained that gene network changes can occur due to mutations or infection and can lead to diseases such as cancer.
“Nematodes are a powerful model system for us to study how gene networks can change, because we can get answers inexpensively and on a short time scale,” he said. “By comparing Pristionchus and C. elegans, we hope to learn fundamental principles about how gene networks can become more complex.”
The project will use a combination of bioinformatic and genetics methods to understand how the simple embryonic gene network in an ancestral Pristionchus species underwent expansion over evolutionary time to form a more complex network.
“Two technologies have allowed researchers to address the explosion of this and other evolutionary questions we see today,” Maduro said. “They are (a) rapid genome sequencing at low cost and (b) the ability to use CRISPR to knock out genes in the genome at low cost and high efficiency.”
Maduro added that nematode species can be found in almost every ecological niche on Earth.
“There are maybe a million different species,” he said. “We can only study a small number of them. Pristionchus garnered scientific interest only about 25 years ago and research took off in earnest in the past decade when CRISPR became available to simplify gene editing. P. pacificus has three genes that specify the gut, but other related species have fewer genes. We have an opportunity to study the stepwise evolution of how this network got bigger and more complicated.”
Preliminary work in Maduro’s lab identified two of these three expanded genes in Pristionchus. When the gene pair was deleted, the gut disappeared in about half of the worms.
“We now need to delete that third gene to make sure we know that’s the only other gene that leads to gut specification,” Maduro said. “This grant will help us do that.”
The project will provide teaching and training opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students, including through a freshman laboratory course in nematode genetics, bioinformatics, microscopy, and molecular biology. Four undergraduate students will receive summer support for each year of the grant to work on projects related to Pristionchus. The grant will support up to two graduate students. Maduro will be assisted in the research by his wife, Gina Broitman-Maduro, an associate specialist in his lab. The start date of the grant is January 15, 2024.
The University of California, Riverside is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state and communities around the world. Reflecting California's diverse culture, UCR's enrollment is more than 26,000 students. The campus opened a medical school in 2013 and has reached the heart of the Coachella Valley by way of the UCR Palm Desert Center. The campus has an annual impact of more than $2.7 billion on the U.S. economy. To learn more, visit www.ucr.edu.
Earth-sized planet discovered in ‘our solar backyard’
'It’s a useful planet because it may be like an early Earth'
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
IMAGE:
YOUNG, HOT, EARTH-SIZED PLANET HD 63433D SITS CLOSE TO ITS STAR IN THE CONSTELLATION URSA MAJOR, WHILE TWO NEIGHBORING, MINI-NEPTUNE-SIZED PLANETS — IDENTIFIED IN 2020 — ORBIT FARTHER OUT.
MADISON — A team of astronomers have discovered a planet closer and younger than any other Earth-sized world yet identified. It’s a remarkably hot world whose proximity to our own planet and to a star like our sun mark it as a unique opportunity to study how planets evolve.
The new planet was described in a new study published this week by The Astronomical Journal. Melinda Soares-Furtado, a NASA Hubble Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who will begin work as an astronomy professor at the university in the fall, and recent UW–Madison graduate Benjamin Capistrant, now a graduate student at the University of Florida, co-led the study with co-authors from around the world.
“It’s a useful planet because it may be like an early Earth,” says Soares-Furtado.
Here is what scientists know about the planet:
The planet is known as HD 63433d and it’s the third planet found in orbit around a star called HD 63433.
HD 63433d is so close to its star, it completes a trip all the way around every 4.2 days.
“Even though it's really close-orbiting, we can use follow-up data to search for evidence of outgassing and atmospheric loss that could be important constraints on how terrestrial worlds evolve,” Soares-Furtado says. “But that’s where the similarities end — and end dramatically.”
Based on its orbit, the astronomers are relatively certain HD 63433d is tidally locked, which means one side is perpetually facing its star.
That side can reach a brutal 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit and may flow with lava, while the opposite side is forever dark.
What you should know about the planet’s star:
HD 63433 is roughly the same size and star type as our sun, but (at about 400 million years old) it’s not even one-tenth our sun’s age.
The star is about 73 light years away from our own sun and part of the group of stars moving together that make up the constellation Ursa Major, which includes the Big Dipper.
“On a dark night in Madison,” Soares-Furtado says, “you could see [HD 63433] through a good pair of binoculars.”
Since then, TESS took four more looks at the star, compiling enough data for the researchers to detect HD 63433d crossing between the star and the satellite.
What comes next:
The researchers, including UW–Madison study co-authors graduate student Andrew C. Nine, undergraduate Alyssa Jankowski and Juliette Becker, a UW–Madison astronomy professor, think there is plenty to learn from HD 63433d.
The planet is uniquely situated for further study. Its peppy young star is visible from both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, increasing the number of instruments, like the South African Large Telescope or WIYN Observatory in Arizona (both of which UW–Madison helped design and build) that can be trained on the system.
And the star is orders of magnitude closer than many Soares-Furtado has studied, possibly affording opportunities to develop new methods to study gasses escaping from the planet’s interior or measure its magnetic field.
“This is our solar backyard, and that's kind of exciting,” Soares-Furtado says. “What sort of information can a star this close, with such a crowded system around it, give away? How will it help us as we move on to look for planets among the maybe 100 other, similar stars in this young group it’s part of?”
This research was supported in part by grants from NASA (HST-HF2-51493.001-A, 21-ASTRO21-0068 and XRP 80NSSC21K0393) and the National Science Foundation (AST-2143763, PHY-2210452 and 1745302).
HD 63433 Fact Sheet.PNG
Young, hot, Earth-sized planet HD 63433d sits close to its star in the constellation Ursa Major, while two neighboring, mini-Neptune-sized planets — identified in 2020 — orbit farther out.
TESS Hunt for Young and Maturing Exoplanets (THYME). XI. An Earth-sized Planet Orbiting a Nearby, Solar-like Host in the 400 Myr Ursa Major Moving Group
