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, September 18, 2026
Review surveys the ocean's medicine cabinet, from cancer-fighting alkaloids to antiviral compounds
Why the ocean is such a rich source of drug candidates
Covering more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, the ocean hosts coral reefs, deep‑sea habitats, and mangroves that support extraordinary biodiversity. These ecosystems have adapted to harsh conditions, turning marine organisms into a rich yet still underutilized source of compounds for medicine — a field known as marine pharmacognosy.
Why the Ocean Is Such a Rich Source of Drug Candidates
Marine pharmacognosy is based on a simple principle: organisms living in extreme or highly competitive environments, such as coral reefs or the deep sea, often evolve unique chemical compounds to survive. These compounds may help them deter predators, compete for space, or withstand pressure and low light. The review notes that sponges, algae, corals, tunicates, and marine microorganisms are particularly promising sources for drug discovery, provided that research methods avoid damaging the ecosystems from which they are drawn.
How the Review Was Put Together
The authors conducted their analysis using peer‑reviewed literature on marine bioactive compounds from three major databases: Scopus, PubMed, and Web of Science. Rather than offering a broad overview, the review focuses on modern discovery tools such as high‑throughput screening (which enables rapid testing of large numbers of compounds for biological activity), computational biology, and genomics. It also examines two case studies — trabectedin and vidarabine — while addressing broader issues of compound production, sustainability, and conservation.
Compounds Already Making a Difference
The authors conducted their analysis using peer‑reviewed literature on marine bioactive compounds from three major databases: Scopus, PubMed, and Web of Science. Rather than offering a broad overview, the review focuses on modern discovery tools such as high‑throughput screening (which enables rapid testing of large numbers of compounds for biological activity), computational biology, and genomics. It also examines two case studies — trabectedin and vidarabine — while addressing broader issues of compound production, sustainability, and conservation.
The Tools Driving Discovery, and the Barriers Slowing It Down
According to the review, high‑throughput screening and synthetic biology are enabling researchers to identify and reproduce promising marine compounds more efficiently, while genomic sequencing provides new insights into the organisms that produce them. Nonetheless, significant challenges remain: many compounds occur naturally only in minute quantities, making extraction costly and impractical, and overharvesting poses serious sustainability and conservation risks.
Balancing Discovery With Conservation
The review emphasizes that sustainable sourcing — whether through synthetic production or environmentally responsible harvesting — must be central to the future of marine pharmacognosy. It highlights deep‑sea exploration and green chemistry as potential strategies for discovering new compounds while addressing urgent public health challenges such as antibiotic resistance. The overarching message is that drug discovery and marine biodiversity protection need not be in conflict; with advanced technology and genuine conservation commitments, both goals can be pursued together.
About the Authors
The corresponding author of the review, Raj Kumari Kataria, is affiliated with the Department of Pharmacy at I.T.S College of Pharmacy, Murad Nagar, Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, India. Co‑author Somesh Saxena is associated with the Raj Kumar Goel Institute of Technology (RKGIT), Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, India.
Roughly 90 percent of the entire ice in the world is saved in the Antarctic. If large quantities of these ice sheets were to melt, it would lead to a dramatic rise in global sea levels. “Thanks to satellite observations, we now have good data on ice movements and surface changes,” explains Dr. Thorsten Seehaus from the Institute of Geography at FAU. “However, we are lacking information on ice thickness and the bed topography along the coasts and underneath the ice shelves that cannot be observed from space.”
“The Antarctic coastline is a closely interconnected system where ice lying on the ocean floor meets the ocean and in which small changes can make a huge impact.”
Dr. Thorsten Seehaus
Interconnected system of ice, ocean and ocean floor
In a recent study, 80 researchers from 16 countries have summarized the current findings on the interactions between ice, ocean, atmosphere and the subsurface in the Antarctic coastal zone. The researchers from the areas of glaciology, oceanography, geophysics and atmospheric sciences have identified major gaps in knowledge, particularly regarding bed topography. These blind spots mean that even highly developed models of the ice sheet can deliver inaccurate results. For instance, when assessing ice movements, it is crucial to know whether the subsurface rises or falls on the approach to the sea. The study has been coordinated by the RINGS group of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR).
“Ice loss in the Antarctic is caused predominantly by the interaction between the ice and the surrounding ocean and by ice discharge at the edges of the ice sheet, and less by ice melting on the surface,” explains Seehaus. “The Antarctic coastline is a closely interconnected system where ice lying on the ocean floor meets the ocean and in which small changes can make a huge impact.” Processes close to this grounding zone, the point at which the ice rises from the ocean floor and starts to float, may trigger counter reactions that accelerate ice loss.
Coordinated action necessary
In recent years, geographers from FAU have been involved in several expeditions to the Antarctic peninsula, a region in the northwest of the continent. Together with the the Alfred Wegener Institute Bremerhaven and research partners from Argentina, they have measured the thickness of the ice sheet there from airplanes and helicopters. Future projects, including with partners from South America, are in the pipeline and aim to close gaps in the knowledge concerning ice thickness and the topography of coastal regions. According to Thorsten Seehaus, “cooperations like this are important, as no one country has the resources to provide comprehensive data for the whole region.” Furthermore, as stated explicitly in the study, central coordination of the international research projects is essential to avoid data gaps and duplicate data collection, and to create an evidence-based framework for improved projections of sea levels.
First US patient reaches major milestone toward a bionic arm anchored to bone, nerves and muscles
Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, in partnership with Northwestern Medicine, University of Chicago and Integrum, is pioneering a first-of-its-kind clinical study that could redefine the future of upper-limb prosthetics
The video opens with the participant seated, two weeks after his surgery, so his dressings are still in place. A small metal post (the abutment) extends from his residual limb — it's anchored directly to his bone, and wires run through it from sensors inside his arm. These sensors pick up electrical signals from his muscles. There are also electrodes gently wrapped around two of the major nerves in his arm so that in the future we can stimulate his nerves and he can receive sensation. The orange cable connects that post to a small battery-powered microcontroller system that is attached to the arm. Those signals are fed to an artificial intelligence program that has learned to recognize what movement he's trying to make. When he thinks about moving his missing (phantom) hand, the AI decodes his muscle signals and moves the demonstration arm to match — no buttons or switches, just natural, intuitive effort. We ask him to mirror each movement with his intact hand so we can confirm the robotic arm is doing what he intends, and the computer screen lets the team verify everything is working properly. An occupational therapist then coaches him on refining his muscle contractions and builds a practice program he can continue at home.
Chicago — Embargoed until Sept. 17, 2026, 8 am ET — A Chicago-area man is set to become the first person in the United States to receive a bionic arm connected directly to his bone, nerves and muscles — an advanced prosthesis designed to be controlled by his own neural signals and return sensory feedback in real time.
The man lost his left arm above the elbow in a construction-site accident in 2016. Now, he is the first participant in a five-year osseointegration clinical study led by Levi Hargrove, PhD, director of the Regenstein Foundation Center for Bionic Medicine at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab and professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
On July 15, in an eight-hour operation at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, a combined team of plastic and orthopedic surgeons — led by Jason Ko, MD, vice chair of clinical operations, Department of Surgery at Northwestern Medicine, and Terrance Peabody, MD, chair of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Northwestern Medicine — implanted a titanium fixture into the bone of the man's residual limb and placed electrodes onto his muscles and around his nerves. The procedure was conducted under an investigational device exemption (IDE) from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
How It Works
Osseointegration is a technique in which a metal implant is anchored into a person's residual bone. Over several months, bone grows into the implant's surface, making it a structural extension of the skeleton. A second component then passes through the skin, allowing a prosthesis to attach directly to the bone, eliminating the socket that conventional prostheses rely on — and, by extension, associated discomfort, poor fit and limited range of motion.
The e-OPRA (Enhanced Osseoanchored Prostheses for the Rehabilitation of Amputees) system builds on that foundation by routing signals through the same implant. Electrodes placed on muscle record the electrical activity generated when a person intends to move, and those signals are decoded to drive the prosthesis. Separately, electrodes placed around peripheral nerves deliver stimulation that creates sensations perceived as coming from the missing limb. The study will evaluate whether that feedback improves how well and how naturally research subjects can use the arm.
"This is about the interface, not the arm," Dr. Hargrove said. "e-OPRA takes on two of the hardest problems in the field at once. It anchors the prosthesis directly to the skeleton, which eliminates the socket entirely, and it puts the electrodes on the muscles and around the nerves — where the signals are clean, stable, and can travel in both directions."
What's New
The study is the first to combine osseointegration, targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR) and pattern-recognition control using implanted electromyography (EMG) sensors and nerve cuff electrodes for sensory feedback. TMR — a surgical technique developed in 2002 by collaborators at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab and Northwestern Medicine that revolutionized the neuroprosthetics industry — reroutes nerves that once served the missing hand to remaining muscles in the residual limb, giving those nerves a place to produce signals a prosthesis can read.
Eight participants will be enrolled in the study. Surgeons at Northwestern Medicine are implanting the devices and, depending on each participant's history, performing TMR at the time of implantation or revising nerve transfers done previously.
Rickard Brånemark, MD, PhD — who developed the OPRA osseointegrated implant system on which e-OPRA is built — traveled from Sweden to Chicago and was in the operating room on July 15, providing technical guidance to the surgical team. He is chairman of the board of Integrum AB, whose U.S. subsidiary, Integrum Inc., is a study partner. Researchers at the University of Chicago, led by Charles Greenspon, PhD, are leading the sensory feedback component of the work.
The study is supported by an $8.7 million award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health, through a phased mechanism designed to move early-stage neural technologies into patient trials.
Next Steps: Rehabilitation and Evaluation
Today, the man who underwent surgery July 15, as well as a prior surgery in preparation, is recovering as his body adapts to the implant.
“This e-OPRA surgery was unique because the implanted nerve cuffs will provide sensory feedback to the missing hand when the patient uses his new bionic arm, considered to be the ‘holy grail’ for neuroprosthetics,” said Dr. Ko, the lead study investigator for Northwestern Medicine. “The combination of a bone-anchored prosthesis, internal muscle and nerve electrodes represents a major advancement in prosthetic technology. Now, the electrical signals that control the bionic arm will not be affected by sweat, skin motion, swelling or other external factors that prevented our patient from successfully using a bionic arm previously.”
“These e-OPRA surgeries are another example of the decades-long teamwork and deep collaboration between Northwestern Medicine’s Orthoplastic Program and Shirley Ryan AbilityLab that are focused on advanced limb restoration and bionic reconstruction,” said Dr. Peabody. “The surgeries are technically demanding and require both the bone expertise from orthopaedic surgery and the soft tissue and nerve techniques pioneered by plastic surgery at Northwestern Medicine. Our patient’s surgeries were successful. He is recovering as expected and is very excited about what he is already able to do with his practice bionic arm.”
The research team can already capture muscle signals from the implanted electrodes — the signals that will eventually control the prosthesis. In the coming months, the man will begin rehabilitation at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab and training with the bionic arm. The study is expected to conclude in 2030, at which point results will be made publicly available.
This research is supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number UH3NS127063. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health or the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Shirley Ryan AbilityLab is pioneering a first-of-its-kind clinical study that could redefine the future of upper-limb prosthetics. Recently, the study reached a major milestone when a Chicago-area man underwent an operation at Northwestern Medicine thatconsisted ofimplanting a titanium fixture into the bone of the residual limb and placing electrodes onto his muscles and around his nerves. Now, he is set to become the first person in the U.S. to receive a bionic arm connected directly to his bone, nerves and muscles — an advanced prosthesis designed to be controlled by his own neural signals and return sensory feedback in real time.
Shirley Ryan AbilityLab is pioneering a first-of-its-kind clinical study that could redefine the future of upper-limb prosthetics. Recently, the study reached a major milestone when a Chicago-area man underwent an operation at Northwestern Medicine thatconsisted ofimplanting a titanium fixture into the bone of the residual limb and placing electrodes onto his muscles and around his nerves. Now, he is set to become the first person in the U.S. to receive a bionic arm connected directly to his bone, nerves and muscles — an advanced prosthesis designed to be controlled by his own neural signals and return sensory feedback in real time.
Credit
Shirley Ryan AbilityLab
Study maps where humans are driving harmful nutrient levels along coasts
VANCOUVER, Wash. — Along a quarter of the planet’s coastal waterways, humans contribute more harmful nitrogen – via agricultural runoff, wastewater discharges and other activities – than all natural sources combined.
That is a key finding from a new study, led by Washington State University, that measured and mapped the human impact on nitrogen, phosphorus and silicon inputs to the planet’s coastal waters, which can have a destructive impact on marine life, as well as health risks for people.
“Coastal ecosystems provide food, jobs, and recreation for billions of people worldwide, but these coastal waters are threatened by nutrient pollution that can fuel harmful algae blooms, oxygen-depleted dead zones, and biodiversity shifts,” said John Harrison, the corresponding author of the new publication and Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professor in WSU’s School of the Environment, where he directs the Global Change and Watershed Biogeochemistry Laboratory.
The study, published in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles, found that human activities outpace all natural nutrient sources in many coastal waterways, and that land-based sources of the nutrients — both natural and human-caused — contributed more than marine sources in roughly half the planet’s coastal waters.
The good news: Reducing nutrient discharge can make a big difference, and the research pinpoints where such steps may be most effective.
“Getting a handle on nutrient inputs to the coastal zone and mitigating them is important, but we need to be sure that we invest our resources where it's going to make a difference,” Harrison said. “This work provides a first cut at a framework to use resources to manage coastal zones efficiently.”
Harrison’s co-authors included scientists from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and Zhejiang University in China.
Levels of nitrogen, phosphorus and silicon, as well as their ratios to each other, are key for healthy marine life. The nutrients occur naturally, in both the ocean and on land, but human activities contribute substantially as well. Among some oceanographers, Harrison said, the idea that land-based sources are a dominant factor was considered unlikely, given the vast size of the ocean.
“I really wanted to understand whether that worldview was correct or whether the community of scientists that studies coastal impacts of land-based nutrients was correct in thinking that these nutrient inputs were really important,” Harrison said. “So, this is a first attempt to put together what we know about what's coming from land with what we know about what comes from offshore sources.”
Humans add nitrogen and phosphorus to rivers in several ways, including fertilizer and manure runoff from farms, wastewater emissions from sewage systems, urban runoff from city lawns and streets, and emissions from cars and power plants.
Past studies have evaluated the overall global effects of human activity on nutrient levels; the new study is the most comprehensive to date, in that it includes both land-based and marine sources of multiple nutrients.
Researchers developed a novel database of global sources of nitrogen, phosphorus and silicon levels across pre-industrial and contemporary time spans and evaluated the contribution of land-based human activities, as well as the impact on nutrient ratios and the potential for eutrophication, a condition promoting algae growth.
While natural marine sources were still the largest overall contributor of nutrients, land-based sources made up the majority of nutrients for more than half the world’s coastlines, the researchers found.
The effects were more pronounced in concentrated areas of human impact. Human activities added more nitrogen than all natural sources in a quarter of coastal waterways and a fifth of large ocean areas extending outward from the coasts known as Large Marine Ecosystems. In terms of phosphorus, human activities contributed more than natural sources in 11% of coastal waterways.
The influence of human activity on silicon tends to move in the other direction, lowering silicon levels. One way that occurs is with river dams blocking the flow of silicon to the coasts.
The study pinpoints areas of greatest concern, including the Gulf of Mexico and coastlines around Europe and Asia.
Several strategies could be adopted to reduce the nutrient load going into rivers, ranging from advanced technology in wastewater plants to improved fertilizer management and no-till farming. The study identifies areas where the health of coastal waters could be directly improved by changes in human contributions.
“There are a number of stretches of coastline globally where a significant increase in nutrient inputs to land would put it in the danger zone, and a significant decrease would take it out of the danger zone,” Harrison said. “So, this work identifies where the situation can be reasonably addressed versus where high natural background nutrient loads are likely to complicate nutrient management efforts.”
Thunderstorm gusts develop suddenly, affect relatively small areas, and often last only a short time. Wind speeds can rise to Force 8 or above within minutes, posing serious risks to aviation, transportation, and outdoor operations. Because conventional identification methods rely heavily on empirical thresholds and are prone to missed detections and false alarms, thunderstorm gusts remain particularly difficult to monitor and warn against.
Recently, Dr. Hengde Zhang, a senior engineer at the National Satellite Meteorological Center, China, and his jointly supervised doctoral students developed a physics-inspired multi-source spatiotemporal deep learning model known as PI-TGNet. By integrating observations from ground-based automatic weather stations, weather radar, and Fengyun-4 satellites, the model can generate regional thunderstorm-gust identification maps every 10 minutes at a spatial resolution of 1 km. These results have been published in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters.
PI-TGNet learns the characteristic wind-speed changes that precede thunderstorm gusts and uses a cross-attention mechanism to connect point observations from weather stations with spatial observations from radar and satellites. "By incorporating physical guidance into the deep learning model, we enable it not only to recognize abrupt changes in wind-speed curves, but also to focus on the key structures of convective systems," Dr. Zhang said. Tests using thunderstorm-gust datasets from eastern and southern China showed that the model achieved a probability of detection of 0.9520 and a critical success index of 0.8151.
The research team plans to evaluate the model under different regional and meteorological conditions and incorporate additional atmospheric physics into its framework. These efforts are expected to improve the model's generalizability and provide more refined and reliable technical support for regional severe-convective-weather monitoring and early warning.
With an $11 million award from the National Institute on Aging, University of Michigan researchers will build and share national data that track how neighborhood conditions change over time, helping scientists study how local environments affect older adults' health.
The National Neighborhood Data Archive, or NaNDA, housed at U-M's Institute for Social Research, will expand its collection by about 30%. It links access to parks, healthy food stores, health care and other community resources with lower risks of hospitalization, chronic disease and disability among older adults.
The archive currently offers more than 250 free public datasets that users have downloaded 125,000 times and cited in more than 270 publications.
"Neighborhoods shape access to services, exposure to environmental hazards and levels of social support, affecting cognitive function, mobility and social interaction," said Grace Noppert, a social and infectious disease epidemiologist at U-M and NaNDA deputy director. "Policymakers, community organizations and researchers across fields use our data. We're creating a public resource that serves many people. Now, we can expand it and work toward becoming a one-stop shop for neighborhood data."
In addition to expanding its data collections and research, the NaNDA team will focus on these projects:
Track respiratory illness by neighborhood: The team will use a 20% national sample of Medicare and Medicaid claims to identify communities with high rates of hospitalizations and emergency care visits for respiratory illnesses, including flu, respiratory syncytial virus and SARS-CoV-2. Researchers plan to develop a dashboard that public health departments and community organizations could use to direct resources.
Measure neighborhood exposure to environmental hazards: Researchers will create measures that track neighborhood exposure to wildfire smoke, high temperatures and other environmental threats. The data could help identify communities at risk as the climate changes.
NaNDA will be enhanced by a dedicated Methods Core that addresses key challenges in neighborhood health research, including uncertainty when combining data from different sources, analyzing complex neighborhood data across places and over time, and accounting for how neighboring communities can affect one another. With support from the Scientific Data and Administrative Cores, these methods will be integrated into NaNDA data products and shared with the scientific community to support rigorous, reproducible research on neighborhoods and aging.
U-M researchers say NaNDA is a direct response to recent calls for more robust data infrastructure to expand the ability to identify local environments that shape healthy aging outcomes.
"The lack of a national, publicly available data infrastructure that includes comprehensive, longitudinal measures of the neighborhood environment has limited our ability to measure and track the dynamic nature of local-level environmental exposures and their impact on healthy aging," said NaNDA director Philippa Clarke.
"Most research remains siloed within specific observational or clinical studies, where neighborhood data are not consistently shared, restricting transparency, reproducibility, and comparability of findings. NaNDA was designed to address this gap by creating and sharing data on the physical, economic, demographic and social environment at multiple spatial scales, including block group, census tract, ZIP code tabulation area and county."
NaNDA data are available for linkages with:
The Health and Retirement Study, Panel Study of Income Dynamics and National Health and Aging Trends Study through the MiCDA enclave
Over 40 million geocoded patient Electronic Health Records in Michigan Medicine's Data Analytics Platform
Datasets from federal and state agencies, including the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey through the Federal Statistical Research Data Centers
