Friday, May 23, 2025

 

Penn engineers discover a new class of materials that passively harvest water from air



University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science
Research team including Daeyone Lee (left), Amish Patel (center) and Stefan Guldin (right). 

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Research team including Daeyone Lee (left), Amish Patel (center) and Stefan Guldin (right) (photo provided by Penn Engineering).

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Credit: Penn Engineering





A serendipitous observation in a Chemical Engineering lab at Penn Engineering has led to a surprising discovery: a new class of nanostructured materials that can pull water from the air, collect it in pores and release it onto surfaces without the need for any external energy. The research, published in Science Advances, was conducted by an interdisciplinary team, including Daeyeon Lee, Russell Pearce and Elizabeth Crimian Heuer Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE), Amish Patel, Professor in CBE, Baekmin Kim, a postdoctoral scholar in Lee’s lab and first author, and Stefan Guldin, Professor in Complex Soft Matter at the Technical University of Munich. Their work describes a material that could open the door to new ways to collect water from the air in arid regions and devices that cool electronics or buildings using the power of evaporation.

“We weren’t even trying to collect water,” says Lee. “We were working on another project testing the combination of hydrophilic nanopores and hydrophobic polymers when Bharath Venkatesh, a former Ph.D. student in our lab, noticed water droplets appearing on a material we were testing. It didn’t make sense. That’s when we started asking questions.”

Those questions led to an in-depth study of a new type of amphiphilic nanoporous material: one that blends water-loving (hydrophilic) and water-repelling (hydrophobic) components in a unique nanoscale structure. The result is a material that both captures moisture from air and simultaneously pushes that moisture out as droplets.

Water-Collecting Nanopores

When water condenses on surfaces, it usually requires either a drop in temperature or very high humidity levels. Conventional water harvesting methods rely on these principles, often requiring energy input to chill surfaces or a dense fog to form to collect water passively from humid environments. But Lee and Patel’s system works differently.

Instead of cooling, their material relies on capillary condensation, a process where water vapor condenses inside tiny pores even at lower humidity. This is not new. What is new is that in their system, the water doesn't just stay trapped inside the pores, as it usually does in these types of materials.

“In typical nanoporous materials, once the water enters the pores, it stays there,” explains Patel. “But in our material, the water moves, first condensing inside the pores, then emerging onto the surface as droplets. That’s never been seen before in a system like this, and at first we doubted our observations.”

A Material That Defies Physics 

Before they understood what was happening, the researchers first thought that water was simply condensing onto the surface of the material due to an artifact of their experimental setup, such as a temperature gradient in the lab. To rule that out, they increased the thickness of the material to see if the amount of water collected on the surface would change. 

“If what we were observing was due to surface condensation alone, the thickness of the material wouldn’t change the amount of water present,” explains Lee. 

But, the total amount of water collected increased as the film’s thickness increased, proving that the water droplets forming on the surface came from inside the material.

Even more surprising: the droplets didn’t evaporate quickly, as thermodynamics would predict. 

“According to the curvature and size of the droplets, they should have been evaporating,” says Patel. “But they were not; they remained stable for extended periods.”

With a material that could potentially defy the laws of physics on their hands, Lee and Patel sent their design off to a collaborator to see if their results were replicable. 

“We study porous films under a wide range of conditions, using subtle changes in light polarization to probe complex nanoscale phenomena,” says Guldin. “But we’ve never seen anything like this. It’s absolutely fascinating and will clearly spark new and exciting research.”

A Stabilized Cycle of Condensation and Release

It turns out that they had created a material with just the right balance of water-attracting nanoparticles and water-repelling plastic — polyethylene — to create a nanoparticle film with this special property.

“We accidentally hit the sweet spot,” says Lee. “The droplets are connected to hidden reservoirs in the pores below. These reservoirs are continuously replenished from water vapor in the air, creating a feedback loop made possible by this perfect balance of water-loving and water-repelling materials.”

A Platform for Passive Water Harvesting and More

Beyond the physics-defying behavior, the materials’ simplicity is part of what makes them so promising. Made from common polymers and nanoparticles using scalable fabrication methods, these films could be integrated into passive water harvesting devices for arid regions, surfaces for cooling electronics or smart coatings that respond to ambient humidity.

“We’re still uncovering the mechanisms at play,” says Patel. “But the potential is exciting. We’re learning from biology — how cells and proteins manage water in complex environments — and applying that to design better materials.”

“This is exactly what Penn does best, bringing together expertise in chemical engineering, materials science, chemistry and biology to solve big problems,” adds Lee.

The next steps include studying how to optimize the balance of hydrophilic and hydrophobic components, scale the material for real-world use and investigating how to make the collected droplets roll off surfaces efficiently.

Ultimately, the researchers hope this discovery will lead to technologies that offer clean water in dry climates or more sustainable cooling methods using only the water vapor already in the air.

This work was supported by National Science Foundation grants NSF-2309043 and NSF-1933704, a Department of Energy grant (DE-SC0021241), a Semilab UCL Chemical Engineering Impact Ph.D. Studentship, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships Program grant (DGE-2236662), an Alfred P. Sloan Research Foundation grant (FG-2017-9406) and a Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation grant (TG-19-033).


Amphiphilic nanopore structure in action [VIDEO] | 

  

Social media fad of nighttime mouth taping to treat mouth breathing may pose serious risks



Review of previously published research also finds little evidence for any benefits of mouth taping




PLOS

Breaking social media fads and uncovering the safety and efficacy of mouth taping in patients with mouth breathing, sleep disordered breathing, or obstructive sleep apnea: A systematic review 

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Social media fad of nighttime mouth taping to treat mouth breathing may pose serious risks.

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Credit: Mohamed_hassan, Pixabay, CC0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)




An evaluation of 10 previously published studies suggests that a recent fad of taping one’s mouth shut while sleeping to prevent mouth breathing may have little benefit and could pose serious asphyxiation risks. Dr. Brian Rotenberg of Western University in London, Ontario, Canada, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on May 21, 2025.

When the nasal passages are blocked, breathing switches from the nose to the mouth. Mouth breathing has been linked to sleep-disordered breathing, which includes conditions ranging from snoring to obstructive sleep apnea, where breathing stops and starts frequently during sleep. A recent trend amplified by social media has some people taping their mouths shut at night in efforts to treat sleep-disordered breathing by preventing mouth breathing.

Despite this fad, the safety and effectiveness of nighttime mouth taping has been unclear. To help clarify the existing evidence, Rotenberg and colleagues at St. Joseph's Health Care London and London Health Sciences Centre Research Institute systematically reviewed studies that have explored the practice. Their analysis included 10 studies that employed different research methods to evaluate the potential benefits of sealing the mouth shut—using tape or other devices, such as chin straps—for a total of 213 patients.

Out of the 10 studies, two suggested that, amongst a subset of people with mild obstructive sleep apnea, mouth taping may be associated with some slight improvement in a standard measure of sleep apnea severity known as the apnea-hyopopnea index. However, other studies found no evidence that mouth taping might help treat mouth breathing, sleep-disordered breathing, or sleep apnea. 

Four of the 10 studies included discussion of a potentially serious risk of asphyxiation posed by sealing the mouth shut during sleep for people whose mouth breathing is caused by serious restriction or blockage of nasal airways. Serious nasal obstruction could result from conditions such as hay fever, chronic rhinitis, deviated septum, sinonasal disease, or enlarged tonsils.

On the basis of these findings, the authors conclude that existing evidence does not support nighttime mouth taping as a treatment for sleep-disordered breathing, including obstructive sleep apnea. However, they note that further research is warranted, as the existing literature is limited with inconsistent study methodology.

The authors add: “Mouth taping is a contemporary practice that is often celebrity-endorsed, but is not necessarily scientifically accurate. Many people are not appropriate for mouth taping, and in some cases it can lead to risk of serious health harm.”

 

 

In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS Onehttps://plos.io/42LfIFY

Citation: Rhee J, Iansavitchene A, Mannala S, Graham ME, Rotenberg B (2025) Breaking social media fads and uncovering the safety and efficacy of mouth taping in patients with mouth breathing, sleep disordered breathing, or obstructive sleep apnea: A systematic review. PLoS One 20(5): e0323643. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0323643

Author countries: Canada

Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.

Viral mouth-taping trend ‘sus’ says Canadian sleep expert




London Health Sciences Centre Research Institute





LONDON, ON – Mouth taping, a growing trend on social media channels like TikTok, carries serious health risks, especially for those with sleep-disordered breathing and obstructive sleep apnea, according to a paper published today in PLOS One. 

The study from Lawson Research Institute (Lawson) of St. Joseph’s Health Care London, London Health Sciences Centre Research Institute (LHSCRI) and Western University’s Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry also found no strong evidence of health benefits. 

The trend involves placing tape over the mouth to stop ‘mouth breathing’ and promote breathing through the nose during sleep. It has been recommended by many social media influencers and celebrities who claim it can lead to better sleep, enhanced oral health and anti-aging results.  

“It was concerning to us that celebrities and influencers are endorsing mouth taping without scientific evidence,” says Dr. Brian Rotenberg, researcher at Lawson, LHSCRI and Schulich Medicine & Dentistry. “In the language of social media influencers, it seemed a bit ‘sus,’ so we examined what science is telling us about this trend and whether or not it is safe.” 

He and his team examined 86 existing scientific studies on the topic, including an in-depth review of 10 studies representing the experience of 213 patients. The team found mouth taping: 

  • Has no strong scientific evidence of health benefits, contradicting claims on social media.  

  • Can make existing sleep-disorder breathing worse by restricting airflow, putting additional stress on the respiratory system and increasing risk of suffocation when patients experience a nasal obstruction.    

“Our research shows that taping the mouth shut during sleep is dangerous, especially among those who may not be aware they have sleep apnea,” adds Rotenberg, who is also an otolaryngologist and sleep surgeon at St. Joseph’s Health Care London and London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC). “These individuals are unknowingly making their symptoms worse and putting themselves at greater risk for serious health complications like heart disease.” 

Rotenberg and his team point to the importance of health research in combatting misinformation and pseudoscience. 

“It’s easy for misinformation to run rampant on social media; we’ve seen this countless times over the past few years,” says Jess Rhee, a Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry resident who is training at London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC). “We need to make health decisions based on strong scientific evidence. Our hope is that people stop taping their mouths during sleep and recognize it is dangerous.” 

  

 

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MEDIA CONTACT:   

Jess Brady, Media Relations Consultant, London Health Sciences Centre, 226-927-7486, media@lhsc.on.ca      

ABOUT LONDON HEALTH SCIENCES CENTRE RESEARCH INSTITUTE 

At London Health Sciences Centre Research Institute (LHSCRI), our teams pioneer discoveries that transform the health of adult and paediatric patients around the world. As the research institute of London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC), we conduct research where patient care is delivered, working alongside patients, families, health-care providers and academic partners like Western University. We are leaders in advancing the understanding, diagnosis, treatment and management of diseases and health conditions through a diverse research program that ranges from laboratory-based science to clinical trials. Our research has a global impact as we build on LHSC’s 150-year legacy of health innovation and drive forward medical breakthroughs that make a difference in the lives of patients and their families. Find us online at www.lhscri.ca and on social media @LHSCRI.  

ABOUT LAWSON RESEARCH INSTITUTE 

Lawson Research Institute, the health innovation arm of St. Joseph's Health Care London, is committed to making and sharing discoveries that improve lives locally and internationally. Every day, Lawson researchers work to transform imagination to innovation to patient impact. Lawson leads health-care research. Find us online at sjhc.london.on.ca/research and on social media @stjosephslondon 

ABOUT WESTERN 
Western University delivers an academic experience second to none. Since 1878, The Western Experience has combined academic excellence with life-long opportunities for intellectual, social and cultural growth in order to better serve our communities. Our research excellence expands knowledge and drives discovery with real-world application. Western attracts individuals with a broad worldview, seeking to study, influence and lead in the international community. For more information, visit https://uwo.ca/  

 

 

SwRI fabricates bed-netting prototypes to target malaria-causing parasites



Researchers share findings from in vivo studies in the latest issue of the journal Nature




Southwest Research Institute

Hot-melt Extrusion Process 

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Southwest Research Institute fabricates high-density polyethylene filaments through a hot-melt extrusion process in a clean room facility. Researchers blended a formulation of antimalarial drugs into the filaments, which can be woven into bed nets to target malaria-causing parasites.

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Credit: Southwest Research Institute





SAN ANTONIO — May 21, 2025 — Southwest Research Institute tapped into its drug formulation and manufacturing expertise to fabricate two bed netting prototypes targeting malaria-causing blood parasites. In a collaboration with researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU)/Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center (PVAMC), SwRI designed netting systems to deliver antimalarial drugs called Endochin-like Quinolones (ELQs) that destroy Plasmodium parasites transmitted by mosquitoes. The findings appear in the latest issue of the journal Nature.

“If an infected mosquito hits or lands on either type of netting, it’s essentially disinfected,” said Institute Scientist Dr. Mike Rubal, a contributor to the Nature article. “The best defense against malaria has been insecticide-treated bed nets or those coated with larvicides, but mosquitoes are developing an immunity to those prevention methods. This novel approach targets the source of the disease.”

In 2023, the World Health Organization reported 263 million cases of malaria and nearly 600,000 deaths worldwide. The disease remains pervasive even with preventative measures and available treatments. Resistance to larvicides and pesticides is a growing concern among malaria researchers.

Rubal’s team coated a commercially available polyester bed net with an ELQ solution synthesized at OHSU/PVAMC. SwRI also blended a second formulation of ELQ into a hot-melt extrusion of high-density polyethylene filaments, which can be woven to make yarn for netting. The team at the Catteruccia lab at Harvard evaluated both netting systems for efficacy.

“We desperately need innovation in malaria control. This study offers a new, effective way to stop the transmission of malaria parasites, which we hope will reduce the burden of this devastating disease in Africa and beyond,” said corresponding author Dr. Flaminia Catteruccia, the Irene Heinz Given Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

Native to tropical and subtropical regions around the world, female Anopheles mosquitoes pass parasites to humans through saliva shared when they bite. Parasites attack and reproduce within the liver and red blood cells causing a variety of symptoms ranging from mild to severe. If left untreated, malaria can lead to brain damage, organ failure and even death, especially among children and other vulnerable populations.

“Our research shows that the two drugs, which are absorbed through the legs of the insect, kill parasites developing within the mosquito. By using two different ELQs, the likelihood of resistance is greatly diminished and possibly eliminated,” said Dr. Michael Riscoe, a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at OHSU. “This emerging technology has great potential to impact efforts to control and eradicate malaria around the world.”

A National Institute of Health (NIH) R01 grant and funding from Open Philanthropy supported the research.

The Nature paper, “In vivo screen of Plasmodium targets for mosquito-based malaria control,” can be accessed here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09039-2.

To learn more, visit https://www.swri.org/markets/biomedical-health/pharmaceutical-development or https://www.swri.org/markets/chemistry-materials/chemistry-chemical-engineering/microencapsulation/extrusion.

 

Are groovy brains more efficient?


A new study finds that the depth of small grooves in the brain's surface is linked to stronger network connectivity and better reasoning ability.



University of California - Berkeley

Sulcal differences among children, adolescents and young adults 

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The MRI scans of nine participants in the study, all children, adolescents and young adults, show how varied the tertiary sulci (color patches) are among individuals. The patches are identified sulci in the lateral prefrontal and lateral parietal cortices of the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

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Credit: Hakkinen et al, UC Berkeley





Many grooves and dimples on the surface of the brain are unique to humans, but they're often dismissed as an uninteresting consequence of packing an unusually large brain into a too-small skull.

But neuroscientists are finding that these folds are not mere artifacts, like the puffy folds you get when forcing a sleeping bag into a stuff sack. The depths of some of the smallest of these grooves seem to be linked to increased interconnectedness in the brain and better reasoning ability.

In a study published May 19 in The Journal of Neuroscience, University of California, Berkeley, researchers show that in children and adolescents, the depths of some small grooves are correlated with increased connectivity between regions of the brain — the lateral prefrontal cortex and lateral parietal cortex — involved in reasoning and other high-level cognitive functions.

The grooves may actually bring those areas closer together in space, shortening the connections between them and speeding communications.

The implication, the researchers say, is that variability in these small grooves, which are called tertiary sulci (pronounced sul'-sigh), may help explain individual differences in cognitive performance, and could serve as diagnostic indicators or biomarkers of reasoning ability or neurodevelopmental disorders.

"The impetus for this study was having seen that sulcal depth correlated with reasoning across children and adolescents," said Silvia Bunge, professor of psychology and a member of UC Berkeley's Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute (HWNI). "Given our previous findings, our former postdoctoral fellow Suvi Häkkinen aimed to test if sulcal depth was correlated with reasoning performance and to test if patterns of coordinated activity within a lateral prefrontal-parietal network could explain this relation between sulcal depth and reasoning."

"We had explicit predictions about which tertiary sulci in the lateral prefrontal cortex would be functionally connected to tertiary sulci in the lateral parietal cortex, and that panned out," added Kevin Weiner, UC Berkeley associate professor of psychology and of neuroscience and a member of HWNI. "Prefrontal and parietal cortices aside, the hypothesis is that the formation of sulci leads to shortened distances between connected brain regions, which could lead to increased neural efficiency, and then, in turn, individual differences in improved cognition with translational applications."

"The cortex is sort of haphazardly crunched up into the brain — that's what I was always taught," Bunge said. "Kevin came along and changed my mind about sulci."

The hills and valleys of the brain

The brains of most animals, mammals included, have smooth surfaces. Primates have hills and valleys covering their cerebral cortex. While one group of primates, the New World monkeys called marmosets, have shallow, barely perceptible sulci, those of humans are deeply incised, with between 60% and 70% of the cortex buried in these folds.

The cortical folding patterns in humans also change with age, establishing their final structure late in prenatal development while becoming less prominent in old age.

"While sulci can change over development, getting deeper or shallower and developing thinner or thicker gray matter — probably in ways that depend on experience — our particular configuration of sulci is a stable individual difference: their size, shape, location and even, for a few sulci, whether they're present or absent," said Bunge, who studies abstract reasoning in young people, from 6 years of age through young adulthood.

The smallest grooves, many of which are uniquely human, are called tertiary sulci because they appear last in prenatal development and are never as deep as the major or primary sulci that are most evident on the cerebral surface.

Scientists have speculated that the tertiary sulci emerge in parts of the human brain that have expanded the most throughout evolution and have a protracted development, and that they are likely associated with aspects of cognition — reasoning, decision-making, planning and self-control — that develop over a protracted adolescence.

But prior to this study, evidence was lacking for a connection between tertiary sulci and brain connectivity. The UC Berkeley study is one of few, all within the past few years, to provide such proof.

Sulci linked to cognition

Weiner and Bunge said that, as undergraduates, they were never taught how to define tertiary sulci; they often examined scans of average brains that did not match any specific individual.

Weiner noticed this mismatch as an undergraduate.

"At the time, all I knew was that I had some cortical squiggles that weren’t in the average brain atlases that we had in the lab. So the question I asked my mentors, Sabine Kastner and Charlie Gross, was: Do I have different structures that aren't in our atlases or are structures missing from these atlases?" he said. "That sent me down a 15-year rabbit hole studying one particular tertiary sulcus in the visual cortex."

That work showed that a specific sulcus, the mid-fusiform sulcus, varied in length from as small as 3 millimeters to as long as 7 centimeters in any given person. Moreover, the longer the sulcus, the better a person was at processing and recognizing human faces.

"About 2% of individuals have developmental prosopagnosia, which means they can't perceive faces, and they don't have any brain damage," he said. "That sulcus, especially in the right hemisphere, is shorter and shallower in those folks than in what we refer to as neurotypical controls."

Building on that rabbit hole, Bunge and Weiner wondered whether tertiary sulci in other regions of the brain, outside the visual processing units, also correlated with cognitive ability. Upon moving to UC Berkeley in 2018, Weiner began investigating the prefrontal cortex — located in the front of the brain behind the forehead — in collaboration with Bunge, who wanted to test whether sulci in this area would be linked to reasoning.

In a 2021 paper, the two collaborated to define all the smaller sulci in the lateral prefrontal cortex and created a computer model that identified the tertiary sulci as contributing the most variation in reasoning ability.

"The model identified that there's tertiary sulci in the lateral prefrontal cortex that are contributing to reasoning skills in kids," Weiner said.

Expanding on that work in the new study, Weiner, Bunge and their colleagues painstakingly catalogued the tertiary sulci in the lateral parietal cortex, located under and just behind the crown of the skull, and investigated its functional connections with the sulci of the lateral prefrontal cortex. For both studies, they studied 43 participants, 20 of them female, who ranged in age from 7 to 18. While in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, the participants were given a reasoning task. The researchers focused on the brain activity in 21 sulci they had identified in each hemisphere of the brain, and the functional connections between these sulci — including, for the first time, tertiary sulci.

Across these individuals, greater depth for several of the sulci implicated in reasoning was associated with higher network centrality across the set of prefrontal and parietal sulci.

Experience affects sulci

Bunge pointed out that the association between depths of sulci and reasoning does not hold for all sulci, and that sulcal depth may change with experience.

"Do we think that an individual's capacity for reasoning is set in stone based on their cortical folding? No!," she said. "Cognitive function depends on variability in a variety of anatomical and functional features and, importantly, we know that experience, like quality of schooling, plays a powerful role in shaping an individual's cognitive trajectory, and that it is malleable, even in adulthood."

Weiner's lab is creating a computer program to help researchers identify tertiary sulci in the human brain. Most programs only identify about 35 sulci, but when tertiary sulci are included, there are over 100, he said, including new ones that their labs have uncovered together. They argue that sulci could serve as landmarks to compare brains between individuals, since brains vary so much.

"Dozens of brain maps have been proposed in just the last five years, but they disagree about the areas of associated regions in the cortex, and there are mismatches between areas at the group and individual level," Weiner said. "Examining network architecture based on individual sulcal morphology circumvents these disagreements and mismatches, with the opportunity to glean network-level insight from the local sulcal anatomy that is specific to a given individual."

Aside from Bunge and Weiner, other UC Berkeley co-authors of the paper are former postdoctoral fellow Suvi Häkkinen, former graduate student Willa Voorhies, former undergraduates Ethan Willbrand and Jewelia Yao, and former visiting scholars Yi-Heng Tsai and Thomas Gagnant.

The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health through grants from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R21HD100858) and the National Institute of Mental Health (R01MH133637), and the National Science Foundation (CAREER Award 2042251).