Desalination breakthrough could lead to cheaper water filtration

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

 NEWS RELEASE 31-DEC-2020

Research News

Producing clean water at a lower cost could be on the horizon after researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and Penn State solved a complex problem that has baffled scientists for decades, until now.

Desalination membranes remove salt and other chemicals from water, a process critical to the health of society, cleaning billions of gallons of water for agriculture, energy production and drinking. The idea seems simple -- push salty water through and clean water comes out the other side -- but it contains complex intricacies that scientists are still trying to understand.

The research team, in partnership with DuPont Water Solutions, solved an important aspect of this mystery, opening the door to reduce costs of clean water production. The researchers determined desalination membranes are inconsistent in density and mass distribution, which can hold back their performance. Uniform density at the nanoscale is the key to increasing how much clean water these membranes can create.

"Reverse osmosis membranes are widely used for cleaning water, but there's still a lot we don't know about them," said Manish Kumar, an associate professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at UT Austin, who co-led the research. "We couldn't really say how water moves through them, so all the improvements over the past 40 years have essentially been done in the dark."

CAPTION

Paper co-author Kaitlin Brickey, a Penn State graduate student in chemical engineering, stands in front of the scanning electron microscope that allowed researchers to examine how dense pockets in membranes could hinder efficient water filtration efforts.

CREDIT

Tyler Henderson/Penn State

The findings were published today in Science.

The paper documents an increase in efficiency in the membranes tested by 30%-40%, meaning they can clean more water while using significantly less energy. That could lead to increased access to clean water and lower water bills for individual homes and large users alike.

Reverse osmosis membranes work by applying pressure to the salty feed solution on one side. The minerals stay there while the water passes through. Although more efficient than non-membrane desalination processes, it still takes a large amount of energy, the researchers said, and improving the efficiency of the membranes could reduce that burden.

"Fresh water management is becoming a crucial challenge throughout the world," said Enrique Gomez, a professor of chemical engineering at Penn State who co-led the research. "Shortages, droughts -- with increasing severe weather patterns, it is expected this problem will become even more significant. It's critically important to have clean water availability, especially in low-resource areas."

The National Science Foundation and DuPont, which makes numerous desalination products, funded the research. The seeds were planted when DuPont researchers found that thicker membranes were actually proving to be more permeable. This came as a surprise because the conventional knowledge was that thickness reduces how much water could flow through the membranes.

The team connected with Dow Water Solutions, which is now a part of DuPont, in 2015 at a "water summit" Kumar organized, and they were eager to solve this mystery. The research team, which also includes researchers from Iowa State University, developed 3D reconstructions of the nanoscale membrane structure using state-of-the-art electron microscopes at the Materials Characterization Lab of Penn State. They modeled the path water takes through these membranes to predict how efficiently water could be cleaned based on structure. Greg Foss of the Texas Advanced Computing Center helped visualize these simulations, and most of the calculations were performed on Stampede2, TACC's supercomputer.

CAPTION

The density of filtration membranes, even at the atomic scale, can greatly affect how much clean water can be produced.

CREDIT

Enrique Gomez/Penn State

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CAPTION

Producing clean water at a lower cost could be on the horizon after researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and Penn State solved a complex problem that has baffled scientists for decades, until now. Desalination membranes remove salt and other chemicals from water, a process critical to the health of society, cleaning billions of gallons of water for agriculture, energy production and drinking. The idea seems simple -- push salty water through and clean water comes out the other side -- but it contains complex intricacies that scientists are still trying to understand. The research team, in partnership with DuPont Water Solutions, solved an important aspect of this mystery, opening the door to reduce costs of clean water production. The researchers determined desalination membranes are inconsistent in density and mass distribution, which can hold back their performance. Uniform density at the nanoscale is the key to increasing how much clean water these membranes can create.

Researchers measure, model desalination membranes to maximize flow, clean more water

IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY

NEWS RELEASE 31-DEC-2020

Research News

 

IMAGE: THIS 3D MODEL OF A POLYMER DESALINATION MEMBRANE SHOWS WATER FLOW -- THE SILVER CHANNELS, MOVING FROM TOP TO BOTTOM -- AVOIDING DENSE SPOTS IN THE MEMBRANE AND SLOWING FLOW. view more 

CREDIT: IMAGE BY THE GANAPATHYSUBRAMANIAN RESEARCH GROUP/IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY AND GREGORY FOSS/TEXAS ADVANCED COMPUTING CENTER.

AMES, Iowa - Nature has figured out how to make great membranes.

Biological membranes let the right stuff into cells while keeping the wrong stuff out. And, as researchers noted in a paper just published by the journal Science, they are remarkable and ideal for their job.

But they're not necessarily ideal for high-volume, industrial jobs such as pushing saltwater through a membrane to remove salt and make fresh water for drinking, irrigating crops, watering livestock or creating energy.

Can we learn from those high-performing biological membranes? Can we apply nature's homogenous design strategies to manufactured, polymer membranes? Can we quantify what makes some of those industrial membranes perform better than others?

Researchers from Iowa State University, Penn State University, the University of Texas at Austin, DuPont Water Solutions and Dow Chemical Co. - led by Enrique Gomez of Penn State and Manish Kumar of Texas - have used transmission electron microscopy and 3D computational modeling to look for answers.

Iowa State's Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, the Joseph C. and Elizabeth A. Anderlik Professor in Engineering from the department of mechanical engineering, and Biswajit Khara, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering, contributed their expertise in applied mathematics, high-performance computing and 3D modeling to the project.

The researchers found that creating a uniform membrane density down to the nanoscale of billionths of a meter is crucial for maximizing the performance of reverse-osmosis, water-filtration membranes. Their discovery has just been published online by the journal Science and will be the cover paper of the Jan. 1 print edition.

Working with Penn State's transmission electron microscope measurements of four different polymer membranes used for water desalination, the Iowa State engineers predicted water flow through 3D models of the membranes, allowing detailed comparative analysis of why some membranes performed better than others.

"The simulations were able to tease out that membranes that are more uniform - that have no 'hot spots' - have uniform flow and better performance," Ganapathysubramanian said. "The secret ingredient is less inhomogeneity."

Just take a look at the Science cover image the Iowa State researchers created with assistance from the Texas Advanced Computing Center, said Khara: Red above the membrane shows water under higher pressure and with higher concentrations of salt; the gold, granular, sponge-like structure in the middle shows denser and less-dense areas within the salt-stopping membrane; silver channels show how water flows through; and the blue at the bottom shows water under lower pressure and with lower concentrations of salt.

"You can see huge amounts of variation in the flow characteristics within the 3D membranes," Khara said.

Most telling are the silver lines showing water moving around dense spots in the membrane.

"We're showing how water concentration changes across the membrane." Ganapathysubramanian said of the models which required high-performance computing to solve. "This is beautiful. It has not been done before because such detailed 3D measurements were unavailable, and also because such simulations are non-trivial to perform."

Khara added, "The simulations themselves posed computtional challenges, as the diffusivity within an inhomogeneous membrane can differ by six orders of magnitude"

So, the paper concludes, the key to better desalination membranes is figuring out how to measure and control at very small scales the densities of manufactured membranes. Manufacturing engineers and materials scientists need to make the density uniform throughout the membrane, thus promoting water flow without sacrificing salt removal.

It's one more example of the computational work from Ganapathysubramanian's lab helping to solve a very fundamental yet practical problem.

"These simulations provided a lot of information for figuring out the key to making desalination membranes much more effective," said Ganapathysubramanian, whose work on the project was partly supported by two grants from the National Science Foundation.

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The research team

The project was led by Enrique Gomez, a professor of chemical engineering and materials science and engineering at Penn State University, and Manish Kumar, an associate professor of civil, architectural and environmental engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

Also, from Iowa State University: Biswajit Khara, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian; from Penn State: Tyler Culp, Kaitlyn Brickey, Michael Geitner, Tawanda Zimudzi, Andrew Zydney; from DuPont Water Solutions: Jeffrey Wilbur, Steve Jons; and from Dow Chemical Co.: Abhishek Roy, Mou Paul.

Controlling the nanoscale structure of membranes is key for clean water, researchers find

PENN STATE

Research News

 

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- A desalination membrane acts as a filter for salty water: push the water through the membrane, get clean water suitable for agriculture, energy production and even drinking. The process seems simple enough, but it contains complex intricacies that have baffled scientists for decades -- until now.

Researchers from Penn State, The University of Texas at Austin, Iowa State University, Dow Chemical Company and DuPont Water Solutions published a key finding in understanding how membranes actually filter minerals from water, online today (Dec. 31) in Science. The article will be featured on the print edition's cover, to be issued tomorrow (Jan. 1).

"Despite their use for many years, there is much we don't know about how water filtration membranes work," said Enrique Gomez, professor of chemical engineering and materials science and engineering at Penn State, who led the research. "We found that how you control the density distribution of the membrane itself at the nanoscale is really important for water-production performance."

Co-led by Manish Kumar, associate professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at UT Austin, the team used multimodal electron microscopy, which combines the atomic-scale detailed imaging with techniques that reveal chemical composition, to determine that desalination membranes are inconsistent in density and mass. The researchers mapped the density variations in polymer film in three dimensions with a spatial resolution of approximately one nanometer -- that's less than half the diameter of a DNA strand. According to Gomez, this technological advancement was key in understanding the role of density in membranes.

"You can see how some places are more or less dense in a coffee filter just by your eye," Gomez said. "In filtration membranes, it looks even, but it's not at the nanoscale, and how you control that mass distribution is really important for water-filtration performance."

This was a surprise, Gomez and Kumar said, as it was previously thought that the thicker the membrane, the less water production. Filmtec, now a part of DuPont Water Solutions, which makes numerous desalination products, partnered with the researchers and funded the project because their in-house scientists found that thicker membranes were actually proving to be more permeable.

The researchers found that the thickness does not matter as much as avoiding highly dense nanoscale regions, or "dead zones." In a sense, a more consistent density throughout the membrane is more important than thickness for maximizing water production, according to Gomez.

This understanding could increase membrane efficiency by 30% to 40%, according to the researchers, resulting in more water filtered with less energy -- a potential cost-saving update to current desalination processes.

"Reverse osmosis membranes are so widely used for cleaning water, but there's still a lot we don't know about them," Kumar said. "We couldn't really say how water moves through them, so all the improvements over the last 40 years have essentially been done in the dark."

Reverse osmosis membranes work by applying pressure on one side. The minerals stay there, while the water passes through. While more efficient than non-membrane desalination processes, this still takes an immense amount of energy, the researchers said, but improving the efficiency of the membranes could reduce that burden.

"Freshwater management is becoming a crucial challenge throughout the world," Gomez said. "Shortages, droughts -- with increasing severe weather patterns, it is expected this problem will become even more significant. It's critically important to have clean water available, especially in low resource areas."

The team continues to study the structure of the membranes, as well as the chemical reactions involved in the desalination process. They are also examining how to develop the best membranes for specific materials, such as sustainable yet tough membranes that can prevent the formation of bacterial growth.

"We're continuing to push our techniques with more high-performance materials with the goal of elucidating the crucial factors of efficient filtration," Gomez said.

###

Other contributors include first author Tyler E. Culp, Kaitlyn P. Brickey, Michael Geitner and Andrew Zydney, all of whom are affiliated with the Penn State Department of Chemical Engineering; Biswajit Khara and Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, both with the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Iowa State University; Tawanda J. Zimudzi of the Materials Research Institute (MRI) at Penn State; Jeffrey D. Wilbur and Steve Jons, both with DuPont Water Solutions; and Abhishek Roy and Mou Paul, both with Dow Chemical Company. Gomez is also affiliated with MRI. The microscopic work was conducted on electron microscopes in the Materials Characterization Lab in MRI. DuPont and the National Science Foundation funded the research.

COVID-19's impact on cancer prevention and control in Africa

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE

Research News

 

When the COVID-19 pandemic reached Africa, the continent was already struggling to deal with another public health crisis - a growing cancer epidemic characterized by more than one million new cancer cases and nearly 700,000 deaths per year. In a Perspective, Beatrice Wiafe Addai and Wilfred Ngwa discuss the significant challenges COVID-19 imposed on cancer prevention and control in Africa and how the efforts to address these challenges highlight key opportunities where greater investment could improve cancer care globally. At the start of the pandemic, many African governments were forced to rapidly divert already limited medical and healthcare resources away from cancer patients to treat those infected with SARS-CoV-2 and slow the spread of COVID-19. According to the authors, many African countries curtailed or cut cancer prevention activities, including awareness education and outreach, early detection screening, and vaccination, gaps that are likely to persist beyond the COVID-19 era. In addition, closed borders have made the international sharing of hospital-based resources and specialized lab diagnostics nearly impossible. Wiafa and Ngwa argue that, while necessary, this reallocation of critical health resources could lead to an increase in the number of late-stage cancer diagnoses and, thus, mortality across the continent. However, as many African nations have adapted to rise to these challenges, opportunities have also been created, such as cloud-based education and telemedicine, expansion of localized diagnostic capabilities and more efficient radiotherapy administration. The authors suggest that greater investment or policy in these areas could substantially increase access to cancer care worldwide.

For reporters interested in trends, a June 2020 Science Editorial by Norman E. Sharpless, director of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, addressed the likely impact of the pandemic on cancer mortality in the United States.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6497/1290

Countries led by women haven't fared significantly better in the COVID-19 pandemic

PLOS

 NEWS RELEASE 31-DEC-2020

Research News

 

IMAGE: DIFFERENCES IN CULTURAL TRAITS BY WOMEN-LED AND MEN-LED COUNTRIES ALONG THE DIMENSIONS EXAMINED IN THE PAPER. view more 

CREDIT: WINDSOR ET AL, 2020 (PLOS ONE, CC BY 4.0)

Countries led by women have not fared significantly better in the COVID-19 pandemic than those led by men- it may be just our Western media bias that makes us think they have!

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Article Title: "Gender in the time of COVID-19: Evaluating national leadership and COVID-19 fatalities"

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

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0244531

New proposal for how aerosols drive increased atmospheric convection in thunderstorm clouds

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE

Research News

 

High in the clouds, atmospheric aerosols, including anthropogenic air pollutants, increase updraft speeds in storm clouds by making the surrounding air more humid, a new study finds. The results offer a new mechanism explaining the widely observed - but poorly understood - atmospheric phenomenon and provide a physical basis for predicting increasing thunderstorm intensity, particularly in the high-aerosol regions of the tropics. Observations worldwide have highlighted aerosols' impact on weather, including their ability to strengthen convection in deep convective clouds, like those that form during thunderstorms, resulting in larger and more severe storms. Previous studies have suggested two mechanisms by which aerosol concentrations could affect the intensity of convection - both involving the release of latent heat into the atmosphere as moisture within clouds condenses (the "warm-phase") or freezes ("cold-phase") to airborne particles. However, the link between aerosols and increased convection remains unclear and represents a major obstacle to understanding current and future severe weather risks - a particularly salient topic as human activities have become a significant source of atmospheric aerosols. To address this, Tristan Abbot and Timothy Cronin use the System for Atmospheric Modeling (SAM), an atmospheric model that can simulate detailed cloud processes, to study cloud-aerosol interactions. While the results show that the high-resolution simulations could reproduce the observed link between aerosols and convection, Abbott and Cronin found that neither of the previously proposed mechanisms can fully explain this invigoration. The authors offer a third possibility: high aerosol concentrations increase environmental humidity by producing more clouds, which can mix more condensed water into the surrounding air. Because humid air favors stronger updrafts, atmospheric convection can intensify, producing invigorated thunderstorms.

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Model predicts global threat of sinking land will affect 635 million people worldwide

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE

 NEWS RELEASE 31-DEC-2020

Research News

A new analysis suggests that, by 2040, 19% of the world's population - accounting for 21% of the global Gross Domestic Product - will be impacted by subsidence, the sinking of the ground's surface, a phenomenon often caused by human activities such as groundwater removal, and by natural causes as well. The results, reported in a Policy Forum, represent "a key first step toward formulating effective land-subsidence policies that are lacking in most countries worldwide," the authors say. Gerardo Herrera Garcia et al. performed a large-scale literature review that revealed that during the past century, land subsidence due to groundwater depletion occurred at 200 locations in 34 countries. During the next decades, factors including global population and economic growth, exacerbated by droughts, will probably increase land subsidence occurrence and related damages or impacts, they say. Policies that implement subsidence modeling in exposed areas, constant monitoring of high-risk areas, damage evaluation, and cost-effective countermeasures could help reduce the impacts of subsidence where it will hit hardest - namely, areas with increased population density, high groundwater demand, and irrigated areas suffering water stress. Towards informing such policies, the authors developed a model by combining spatial and statistical analyses that identified an area's subsidence susceptibility based on factors like flooding and groundwater depletion caused by human activities. Comparing their model to independent validation datasets revealed it was 94% capable of distinguishing between subsidence and non-subsidence areas. Notably, the model also revealed that most of the 635 million inhabitants in subsistence-susceptible areas are located in Asia, with a total exposed GDP of $9.78 trillion. While the model does not consider existing mitigation measures, potentially resulting in overestimates of subsidence exposure, their results still represent a step forward to effective policies, Herrera et al. say.

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Spontaneous robot dances highlight a new kind of order in active matter

GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Research News

 

IMAGE: WHEN A SWARM OF SMARTICLES IS MADE TO INTERACT IN A CONFINED SPACE, THEY FORM STUNNINGLY SYMMETRIC DANCES WHOSE CHOREOGRAPHY EMERGES SPONTANEOUSLY FROM THE PHYSICS OF LOW RATTLING. view more 

CREDIT: THOMAS A. BERRUETA

Predicting when and how collections of particles, robots, or animals become orderly remains a challenge across science and engineering.

In the 19th century, scientists and engineers developed the discipline of statistical mechanics, which predicts how groups of simple particles transition between order and disorder, as when a collection of randomly colliding atoms freezes to form a uniform crystal lattice.

More challenging to predict are the collective behaviors that can be achieved when the particles become more complicated, such that they can move under their own power. This type of system - observed in bird flocks, bacterial colonies and robot swarms - goes by the name "active matter".

As reported in the January 1, 2021 issue of the journal Science, a team of physicists and engineers have proposed a new principle by which active matter systems can spontaneously order, without need for higher level instructions or even programmed interaction among the agents. And they have demonstrated this principle in a variety of systems, including groups of periodically shape-changing robots called "smarticles" - smart, active particles.

The theory, developed by Dr. Pavel Chvykov at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology while a student of Prof. Jeremy England, who is now a researcher in the School of Physics at Georgia Institute of Technology, posits that certain types of active matter with sufficiently messy dynamics will spontaneously find what the researchers refer to as "low rattling" states.

"Rattling is when matter takes energy flowing into it and turns it into random motion," England said. "Rattling can be greater either when the motion is more violent, or more random. Conversely, low rattling is either very slight or highly organized -- or both. So, the idea is that if your matter and energy source allow for the possibility of a low rattling state, the system will randomly rearrange until it finds that state and then gets stuck there. If you supply energy through forces with a particular pattern, this means the selected state will discover a way for the matter to move that finely matches that pattern."

To develop their theory, England and Chvykov took inspiration from a phenomenon - dubbed dubbed - discovered by the Swiss physicist Charles Soret in the late 19th century. In Soret's experiments, he discovered that subjecting an initially uniform salt solution in a tube to a difference in temperature would spontaneously lead to an increase in salt concentration in the colder region -- which corresponds to an increase in order of the solution.

Chvykov and England developed numerous mathematical models to demonstrate the low rattling principle, but it wasn't until they connected with Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, that they were able to test their predictions.

Said Goldman, "A few years back, I saw England give a seminar and thought that some of our smarticle robots might prove valuable to test this theory." Working with Chvykov, who visited Goldman's lab, Ph.D. students William Savoie and Akash Vardhan used three flapping smarticles enclosed in a ring to compare experiments to theory. The students observed that instead of displaying complicated dynamics and exploring the container completely, the robots would spontaneously self-organize into a few dances -- for example, one dance consists of three robots slapping each other's arms in sequence. These dances could persist for hundreds of flaps, but suddenly lose stability and be replaced by a dance of a different pattern.

After first demonstrating that these simple dances were indeed low rattling states, Chvykov worked with engineers at Northwestern University, Prof. Todd Murphey and Ph.D. student Thomas Berrueta, who developed more refined and better controlled smarticles. The improved smarticles allowed the researchers to test the limits of the theory, including how the types and number of dances varied for different arm flapping patterns, as well as how these dances could be controlled. "By controlling sequences of low rattling states, we were able to make the system reach configurations that do useful work," Berrueta said. The Northwestern University researchers say that these findings may have broad practical implications for microrobotic swarms, active matter, and metamaterials.

As England noted: "For robot swarms, it's about getting many adaptive and smart group behaviors that you can design to be realized in a single swarm, even though the individual robots are relatively cheap and computationally simple. For living cells and novel materials, it might be about understanding what the 'swarm' of atoms or proteins can get you, as far as new material or computational properties."

CAPTION

When a swarm of smarticles is made to interact in a confined space, they form stunningly symmetric dances whose choreography emerges spontaneously from the physics of low rattling.

The study's Georgia Tech-based team includes Jeremy L. England, a Physics of Living Systems scientist who researches with the School of Physics, Dunn Family Professor Daniel Goldman, professor Kurt Wiesenfeld, and graduate students Akash Vardhan (Quantitative Biosciences) and William Savoie (School of Physics). They join graduate student Pavel Chvykov (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), along with professor Todd D. Murphey and graduate students Thomas A. Berrueta and Alexander Samland of Northwestern University.

This material is based on work supported by the Army Research Office under awards from ARO W911NF-18-1-0101, ARO MURI Award W911NF-19-1-0233, ARO W911NF-13-1-0347, by the National Science Foundation under grants PoLS-0957659, PHY-1205878, PHY-1205878, PHY-1205878, and DMR-1551095, NSF CBET-1637764, by the James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Grant 220020476, and the Georgia Institute of Technology Dunn Family Professorship. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsoring agencies.

Traditional Ghanaian medicines show promise against tropical diseases

PLOS

Research News

 

IMAGE: CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION OF TRADITIONAL MEDICINES FOR ACTIVITY AGAINST NTDS.
PHOTO OF SCHISTOSOMIASIS AND ONCHOCERCIASIS SOURCED FROM CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION DPDX - LABORATORY IDENTIFICATION OF PARASITES OF... view more 

CREDIT: OSEI-SAFO 2020 (CC-BY 2.0)

The discovery of new drugs is vital to achieving the eradication of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) in Africa and around the world. Now, researchers reporting in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases have identified traditional Ghanaian medicines which work in the lab against schistosomiasis, onchocerciasis and lymphatic filariasis, three diseases endemic to Ghana.

The major intervention for NTDs in Ghana is currently mass drug administration of a few repeatedly recycled drugs, which can lead to reduced efficacy and the emergence of drug resistance. Chronic infections of schistosomiasis, onchocerciasis and lymphatic filariasis can be fatal. Schistosomiasis is caused by the blood flukes Schistosome haematobium and S. mansoni. Onchocerciasis, or river blindness, is caused by the parasitic worm Onchocerca volvulus. Lymphatic filariasis, also called elephantiasis, is caused by the parasitic filarial worm Wuchereria bancrofti.

In the new work, Dorcas Osei-Safo of the University of Ghana, and colleagues obtained--from the Ghana Federation of Traditional Medicines Practitioners Association--15 traditional medicines used for treating NTDs in local communities. The medicines were available in aqueous herbal preparations or dried powdered herbs. In all cases, crude extracts were prepared from the herbs and screened in the laboratory for their ability to treat various NTDs.

Two extracts, NTD-B4-DCM and NTD-B7-DCM, displayed high activity against S. mansoni adult worms, decreasing the movement of the worms by 78.4% and 84.3% respectively. A different extract, NTD-B2-DCM, was the most active against adult Onchocera onchengi worms, killing 100% of males and more than 60% of females. Eight of 26 crude extracts tested, including NTD-B4-DCM and NTD-B2-DCM, also exhibited good activity against trypanosomes--parasites that cause other human diseases but weren't the original targets of the traditional medicines.

"By embracing indigenous knowledge systems which have evolved over centuries, we can potentially unlock a wealth of untapped research and shape it by conducting sound scientific investigations to produce safe, efficacious and good quality remedies," the researchers say.

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Peer-reviewed; Experimental study; Cells

In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases: http://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0008919

Citation: Twumasi EB, Akazue PI, Kyeremeh K, Gwira TM, Keiser J, Cho-Ngwa F, et al. (2020) Antischistosomal, antionchocercal and antitrypanosomal potentials of some Ghanaian traditional medicines and their constituents. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 14(12): e0008919. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0008919

Funding: DOS, KK, RKA, AF, LEA, RAO are grant recipients of the Worldwide Universities Network Research Development Fund 2017 from the Worldwide Universities Network (UK) and grant number 18-191 RG/CHE/AF/AC_G - FR 3240303659 from The World Academy of Sciences. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Study: in social media safety messages,

the pictures should match the words

Effective posts led to better understanding among new parents

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: RESEARCHERS FOUND THAT PARENTS UNDERSTOOD SAFETY MESSAGING BETTER WHEN THE PICTURE SHOWED THE DESIRED BEHAVIOR, SUCH AS A BABY IN A BUMPER-FREE CRIB. view more 

CREDIT: THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- When using social media to nudge people toward safe and healthy behaviors, it's critical to make sure the words match the pictures, according to a new study.

After looking at social media posts, parents of young children were better able to recall safety messages such as how to put a baby safely to sleep when the images in the posts aligned with the messages in the text, the researchers found.

The study appears in the Journal of Health Communication.

"Many times, scientists and safety experts aren't involved in decisions about social media for health agencies and other organizations, and we end up seeing images that have nothing to do with the safety message or, worse, images that contradict the guidance," said lead author Liz Klein, an associate professor of public health at The Ohio State University.

Take the safe sleep example, for instance. The researchers found posts that advocated a bumper-free crib for baby but used an image of an infant in a crib with bumpers. They saw posts about preventing head injury with bike helmets illustrated by pictures of kids without bike helmets.

"In this study, we were trying to understand how much those mismatches matter -- do people understand the message even if the picture isn't right? Does the picture really matter?" Klein said.

Their answers came from research using eye-tracking technology to gauge the attention young parents paid to various posts, and subsequent tests to see what they recalled about the safety messages.

When the 150 parents in the study were shown a trio of posts with matched imagery and text and three other posts with mismatched visual and written messages, they spent far longer on the matched posts -- 5.3 seconds, compared to the 3.3 seconds their eyes lingered on the mismatched posts.

Further, the matched messages appeared to make a difference in understanding and recall of safety messages. After accounting for differences in health literacy and social media use among participants, the researchers found that each second of viewing time on matched posts was associated with a 2.8% increase in a safety knowledge score.

"With nearly 70% of adults reporting use of social media, and many parents using social media and other internet sources to keep current on injury prevention strategies, social media is a great opportunity to broadcast safety and injury prevention messages," said study co-author Lara McKenzie, a principal investigator in the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus.

"As more health organizations and public health agencies use social media to share health information with the public, the findings of our study underscore the need to ensure that the imagery and text in social media posts are aligned."

Klein said she understands that those managing social media accounts may be drawn to images that are the most attention-grabbing. But when it comes to health and safety, this study suggests that making sure the image and the text are sending the same message is more important.

"If you want people to put their medicine up and out of reach of children, kids to wear their bike helmets or new parents to remember that babies should always go to sleep on their backs, alone and in a crib -- that's where matching matters. Maybe save the eye-grabbing stuff and the humorous posts for different purposes."

Klein said the findings in this study likely extend beyond child safety messaging to any number of health and safety campaigns, but that there's more work to be done to understand how best to harness the power of social media for different types of public health communication.

"We need to pay more attention to how we communicate with the people we're trying to influence with health and safety guidance. All of us can do a better job of thinking about how we use our social media accounts to contribute to better public health," she said.