Thailand will take steps to ensure safety and restore confidence among tourists, officials said on Wednesday, one day after a shooting at a renowned shopping mall in downtown Bangkok that killed two people and injured five others.
The Thai government has attached great importance to this matter and will implement measures to prevent the recurrence of similar incidents, Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin said after joining a one-minute silence at the mall and expressing condolences to the deceased.
He added that the government will be working on the implementation of an alert system to notify the public about emergency situations.
In a press conference, Tourism and Sports Minister Sudawan Wangsuphakijkosol said that government agencies would work harder to restore confidence among tourists.
The police have encouraged shopping malls and other public places to implement stricter security screening and be constantly prepared by providing training for security personnel, Samran Nualma, Assistant Commissioner-General of the Thai Police, told the news conference.
Investigators initially pressed five charges against the suspected gunman, including premeditated murder, attempted murder, illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition, illegally carrying a weapon, and firing shots in a public place, Nakharin Sukhonthawit, commander of Metropolitan Police Division 6, told reporters.
Today, issues related to the climate change, as a shared challenge faced by humanity, are receiving significant attention, and climate cooperation has become an integral part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The demands of the ecologically vulnerable and climate-affected Pacific Island countries have garnered particular attention. Global Times reporter Shan Jie (GT) recently talked with Chen Dezheng (Chen), vice director of the China-Pacific Island Countries Climate Change Cooperation Center and the director of the Research Center for Pacific Island Countries at the Liaocheng University in Shandong, to discuss how China, as a responsible major nation, has engaged in climate cooperation with Pacific Island countries in the recent years, the support China can offer to the South Pacific to reduce the risk of and harms from climate change, and the climate change-related demands shared by China and Pacific Island countries as developing countries via the BRI. GT: The China-Pacific Island Countries Climate Change Cooperation Center has been in operation for a year and a half since its launch in April 2022. Under the BRI framework, what achievements have been made so far, and what plans are underway for further work?
Chen: Since its establishment, the center has organized five high-level academic conferences, including the China-Pacific Island Countries Climate Change High-level Dialogue. In June and November of 2022, it conducted two climate change training courses for officials, scholars, and technical personnel from Pacific Island countries (PICs).
The center has also signed cooperation memoranda and strategic cooperation agreements with institutions such as the University of the South Pacific, the National University of Samoa, the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Atmospheric Physics, and the Ministry of Natural Resources' Second Institute of Oceanography. It has established an atmospheric environment and source analysis laboratory, meteorological stations, and 10 research teams, including those focused on integrated photovoltaic and wind energy generation.
Additionally, it has implemented small-scale climate aid projects for PICs and undertook a 2 million yuan ($280,000) agricultural planting technology project in Tonga. The head of the climate center also visited PICs to introduce the progress of related work to various sectors in those countries. The center also hosted visits by prominent leaders from island countries, including the Speaker of the Parliament of Vanuatu and the Minister of Internal Affairs of Kiribati.
GT: What are the highlights of the cooperation on climate affairs between China and the PICs with the BRI?
Chen: China places great importance on the unique circumstances and concerns of PICs regarding climate change and is committed to helping these countries enhance their climate change resilience. China is dedicated to cooperating with island countries on various levels and through various means to improve their capacity for climate adaptation and climate change mitigation, and high-quality development.
In 2018, China supported the construction of a China-Vanuatu marine joint observation station, continuing collaborative efforts in ocean observation and disaster risk reduction with Vanuatu. To further advance maritime cooperation between China and Vanuatu, China's National Marine Technology Center, in collaboration with the Vanuatu Meteorology and Geo-Hazards Department (VMGD) and the Public Works Department (PWD), jointly planned the construction of Phase II of the China-Vanuatu joint observation station, including a meteorological station. The meteorological station's designs have been completed, and progress is being made in the construction of meteorological infrastructure.
China's National Marine Environmental Forecasting Center (The Tsunami Advisory Center of the Ministry of National Resources) utilizes the national ocean forecasting and warning platform to continuously track and analyze global undersea earthquakes and tsunami monitoring data, providing ocean disaster warning and alert services. In 2023, the center issued tsunami alerts for the Kermadec Islands waters of New Zealand, the waters of Tonga, the southern waters of the Fiji Islands, the New Caledonia waters, and the waters of Papua New Guinea, thereby assisting PICs in safeguarding against marine disasters.
Through initiatives such as the "The Marine Scholarship of China," China has provided scholarship opportunities in marine, environmental, and climate-related areas to PICs. This aligns with China's commitment to offer 2,500 government scholarship opportunities to PICs from 2020 to 2025.
GT: In August, you attended the Pacific Small Island Developing States (SIDS) High-Level Dialogue on Climate Change in Suva, the capital of Fiji, and conducted visits to countries like Kiribati and Tonga. From your understanding, what impact has climate change had on the local people's livelihoods and production? Are you also aware of the local perspectives on climate change?
Chen: After engaging with government departments and academic institutions in countries like Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Kiribati, and others, we have learned that climate change has led to various natural disasters such as high temperatures, floods, droughts and storms, causing damage to the homes of the island nations' residents, reducing their incomes, and affecting their livelihoods significantly.
The interviewees of our research unanimously acknowledged the clear effects of global warming and believe that the intensity and frequency of natural disasters have increased over the last five years.
At the same time, the interviewees all recognized the helpful role of China's assistance in the island nations' efforts to address climate change. Regarding areas of assistance that should be strengthened in the future, more than half of the interviewees suggested enhancing vocational training, disaster relief supplies, and coastal zone planning and management. Over one-third of the interviewees believed that support should be increased in higher education, research facilities, research projects, financial aid, infrastructure, and technology transfer.
GT: The 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference or Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC (COP28) is scheduled to be held in the United Arab Emirates from November 30 to December 12. In terms of climate change, what are the demands of PICs? Have these demands received sufficient attention from developed countries?
Chen: The Pacific island region is one of the most severely affected areas by climate change, characterized by significant environmental sensitivity and vulnerability. Global climate change profoundly affects their right to survival and development. Global climate governance is crucial for the sustainable development of PICs. Over the years, PICs have consistently voiced their concerns on the international stage, advocated for a voice in global climate governance, presented their demands and requests for participation in global climate governance, and continuously pushed for the implementation of climate governance policies and measures in their region. They have become an important force that cannot be ignored in global climate governance.
China has taken into account the demands of island countries in addressing climate change and provided targeted climate governance assistance. However, as a vulnerable group in the international community, PICs still face some challenges in climate governance: Lack of sufficient international discourse power; limited economic capacity and insufficient funding for climate change adaptation; lagging infrastructure development for climate change adaptation; lack of core climate change technologies, and the need for further strengthening of their own efforts in climate governance. GT: What are the paths for China climate governance collaboration with PICs?
Chen: China, as a responsible major nation in the field of climate governance, particularly in its determination and actions in addressing climate change, has instilled hope and bolstered confidence in island countries' efforts to combat climate change. China's principles of green development and sustainability within its ecological civilization construction align closely with the climate change objectives of PICs. The future of climate cooperation between China and the PICs holds even greater promise, facilitating the advancement of the China-PICs community of shared future.
In driving the process of climate cooperation with PICs, China should adopt a strategic approach that combines post-disaster management and source control, and interconnects short and medium- to long-term goals.
Guided by the principle of "harmonious coexistence between humans and nature," China and the PICs could strengthen the exchange and mutual learning of climate governance concepts.
China and island countries should advance high-quality BRI cooperation to enhance disaster protection infrastructure in island countries. China has emphasized the alignment of the BRI initiative with strategic goals, including practical infrastructure cooperation related to natural disasters such as storm surge protection. Exploring ways to enhance disaster resilience in island countries, including the planning and construction of disaster-resistant infrastructure like storm surge barriers and monitoring stations, water storage facilities to combat drought, and improved building standards, is essential.
China could support island nations in developing new energy sources. China encourages enterprises in the solar power and wind power sectors to "go global" and promote the development of exemplary green energy projects. Through flexible cooperation in green industry investment, China aims to help island nations address their energy needs sustainably.
Under the framework of South-South cooperation on climate change, China has allocated approximately 1.1 billion yuan in recent years to provide energy-efficient and new energy products and equipment to developing countries. China possesses technical expertise and operational experience in photovoltaic, tidal, and wave energy generation, as well as small-scale integrated energy solutions. It is recommended to assist island countries in assessing their suitability for solar, wind, and marine energy sources and tailor assistance projects accordingly to their natural conditions and development needs.
PICs have vast exclusive economic zones spanning over 30 million square kilometers, holding tremendous potential for blue economic development. China has actively promoted high-quality, green, and low-carbon development in the marine economy, with advanced expertise in seawater aquaculture and marine ranch construction. China has also established a comprehensive marine spatial planning technology system, which can assist PICs in achieving sustainable development that is low-carbon and environmentally friendly in various aspects.
The recently revealed primary plan for China's crewed moon landing before 2030 where China in which attempt to use two launch vehicles and carry out two rendezvous and docking missions in lunar orbit, has drawn attention worldwide, and the China Space News, an authority news service for state-owned aerospace contractors, further explained that such plan would be highly effective in using China's most advanced space technology and more reliable and economic given it does not rely on the development of a special super heavy-lift rocket to achieve the goal of sending taikonauts to moon.
When the US and Soviet Union tried to execute a manned moon landing, the rendezvous and docking technology had yet to mature and it was also difficult to launch two or more launchers one after another within a short time period. So to develop a super heavy-lift rocket to send moon lander and crewed spacecraft all in one go was the easier and safer path to achieve the goal.
But things are different now. The current reality is that to develop a new-generation heavy-lift carrier rocket would take longer time and cost much more, let alone the difficulty. For example, the development for the US Space Launch System (SLS) took more than 10 years and counting, cost reached somewhere around $50 billion and the SLS is still using interim upper stage, the report pointed out.
Since China has mastered rather matured reliable space rendezvous and docking technology, a two-launcher path would be more reasonable and also feasible.
Zhang Hailian, deputy chief engineer with the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA), disclosed earlier this month that China plans to realize a manned moon landing before 2030, and the country will attempt to build a moon-based scientific research station, in a bid to carry out long-term, systematic lunar research and verify relevant technology.
China will attempt to use two launch vehicles to send a moon surface lander and manned spacecraft into lunar orbit before they carry out rendezvous and docking with each other. Following this maneuver, the taikonauts onboard the manned spacecraft will enter the lander, Zhang said.
Taikonauts will carry out scientific exploration and sample collecting after they descend to the moon's surface using the lander. After completing all preset missions, they will engage the lander to ascend and dock with the manned spacecraft waiting in the lunar orbit, he said.
Then taikonauts will take the lunar samples and ascend from moon surface with the lander that will dock with the manned spacecraft again in lunar orbit before they return to Earth in the manned spacecraft.
A Beijing-based space watcher, who requested not to be named, told the Global Times on Tuesday that China's path of using two launchers for moon landing is no doubt most cost effective, and it fully takes advantage of China's technology strengths in terms of increasingly matured space rendezvous and docking ability which is repeatedly verified and honed in China Space Station missions over the recent years.
Leading Chinese rocket scientist Long Lehao has shown his own vision of China's moon landing in 2021, which also included two launch vehicles carrying a lunar lander and a next-generation manned spaceship for the mission, and the two parts of the spacecraft will rendezvous and dock in near-lunar orbit, before executing the landing process.
But different from Long's vision where he referred to the two launchers in question as Long March-5 DY - variant of the 57-meter-long Long March-5, China's strongest launcher in service, China is now developing the Long March-10 carrier rocket for the moon landing mission.
The new launcher will be a three-stage rocket with two boosters, weighing 2,187 tons at launch, increasing payload launching capability from Long March-5's 8.2 ton to the Lunar transfer orbit to around 27 ton, according to the China Space News, which is equivalent to the US SLS.
Considering that the development cost of the Long March 10 rocket is much lower than that of several heavy rockets in the United States, there is no doubt that China's manned lunar landing program will be more cost-effective and sustainability, the report noted.
As the weather warms, watch for falling rocks. While monitoring a cracked cliff in Yosemite National Park, researchers watched the fissure widen as temperatures rose. The risk of rockfalls could increase as climate change cranks the thermostat, one scientist predicts.
For three and a half years, geologists Brian Collins of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., and Greg Stock of the National Park Service in Yosemite monitored a 19-meter-long crack in one of the park’s cliffs. The crack had a maximum width of about 12 centimeters. A measuring device anchored to both sides of the crack recorded changes in its size. The gap grew and shrank by as much as a centimeter daily as temperature changes caused the rock to expand and contract, the researchers report online March 28 in Nature Geoscience. Some effects lingered, however: The gap widened over the course of several summers and the constant size fluctuations further weakened the rock, the researchers say.
Around 25,000 tons of rocks and debris slipped down Yosemite’s slopes in 2015 — enough to fill more than three Olympic-sized swimming pools. About 15 percent of rockfalls from Yosemite’s granite cliffs occur during summer and at the hottest times of day. The rockfall risk could grow along with the cracks as the climate warms, geoscientist Valentin Gischig of ETH Zurich in Switzerland proposes in a perspective piece on the new finding.
A sugar that freshens air in rooms may also clean cholesterol out of hardened arteries.
The sugar, cyclodextrin, removed cholesterol that had built up in the arteries of mice fed a high-fat diet, researchers report April 6 in Science Translational Medicine. The sugar enhances a natural cholesterol-removal process and persuades immune cells to soothe inflammation instead of provoking it, say immunologist Eicke Latz and colleagues.
Cyclodextrin, more formally known as 2-hydroxypropyl-beta-cyclodextrin, is the active ingredient in the air freshener Febreze. It is also used in a wide variety of drugs; it helps make hormones, antifungal chemicals, steroids and other compounds soluble. If the new results hold up in human studies, the sugar may also one day be used to liquefy cholesterol that clogs arteries. Other researchers say the approach is promising, but must be tested in clinical trials. The sweet molecule is generally considered safe, but injecting it may raise the risk of liver damage or hearing loss, says Elena Aikawa, a vascular biologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Mice taking cyclodextrin in the study did not exhibit side effects from the treatment, but previous work has indicated that the sugar may damage hearing in mice and cats. The molecule shunts cholesterol through the liver, so large cholesterol influxes might cause fat to build up in the liver, impairing its function. “Overall, cyclodextrin seems worth exploring as a therapeutic, although caution should be taken,” Aikawa says.
Cyclodextrin works by flipping a master switch, a gene called LXR, Latz and colleagues found. LXR’s protein turns on other genes involved in processing cholesterol and ushering it out of the body. The sugar also activated the LXR genes in human arteries examined in the lab and turned on inflammation-calming processes, Latz’s team discovered.
Latz, of the University Hospital Bonn in Germany, credits Nevada businesswoman Chris Hempel with the idea to use cyclodextrin to treat atherosclerosis. In people with the condition, cholesterol, calcium, immune cells and other substances form plaques inside arteries, hardening them. Plaques block blood flow and can break away and cause heart attacks and strokes (SN: 2/20/16, p. 32).
Hempel has twin daughters with a rare genetic disease known as Niemann-Pick Type C, in which cholesterol crystals clog organs, especially the brain. In 2009, the girls got special permission from the Food and Drug Administration for their doctor to give them infusions of cyclodextrin to dissolve the cholesterol crystals. Hempel later read a paper by Latz and colleagues in which the researchers described how cholesterol crystals irritate macrophages and provoke them to cause inflammation and heart disease. Macrophages normally patrol the body and help kill invading bacteria, viruses and other pathogens. The immune cells also gobble up cholesterol and deliver it to the liver where it can be made into bile and escorted out of the body in feces.
Hempel e-mailed Latz and suggested that cyclodextrin might melt the cholesterol crystals in arteries. Latz and his colleagues tested the idea by feeding mice genetically prone to atherosclerosis a high-fat diet and giving the animals regular injections of cyclodextrin under the skin. The sugar kept cholesterol plaques from building up in the rodents’ arteries. The scientists also found that cyclodextrin reduced already established plaques in mice by about 45 percent, even though the animals were still eating a high-fat diet.
Cyclodextrin could be used in combination with other drugs, such as statins, says Eran Elinav, an immunologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Statins and other drugs inhibit cholesterol production. “Potentially, combining cholesterol lowering with dissolution of preformed cholesterol in plaques could be additive,” Elinav says, “but this option needs to be explored in clinical trials.”
Although cyclodextrin is already approved by the FDA for use in people, it may be years before it’s known whether injecting the sugar will soften people’s hardened arteries. The sugar is not patentable, so no pharmaceutical companies have come forward to sponsor expensive clinical trials needed to get approval for this specific use, Latz says.
Oxygen on comets might not date all the way back to the birth of the solar system.
Instead, interactions between water, particles streaming from the sun and grains of sand or rust on the comet’s surface could generate the gas. Those interactions could explain the surprising abundance of O2 detected in the fuzzy envelope of gas around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2015 (SN: 11/28/15, p. 6), researchers report May 8 in Nature Communications. Such reactions might also reveal how oxygen forms in other regions of space. “Molecular oxygen is very hard to find out there in the universe,” says Caltech chemical engineer Konstantinos Giapis. When the Rosetta spacecraft detected oxygen around comet 67P, astronomers argued it must be primordial, trapped in water ice as the comet formed roughly 4.6 billion years ago. Intrigued by the result, Giapis and Caltech colleague Yunxi Yao wanted to see if an alternative way to create O2 existed. Drawing on their work with fast-moving charged particles and materials such as silicon, they performed experiments that showed that charged water particles could slam into rust or sand grains and generate O2.
Something similar could happen on comet 67P, they suggest. As the sun evaporates water from the comet’s surface, ultraviolet light could strip an electron from the water, giving it a positive charge. Then, fast-moving particles in the solar wind could shoot the ionized water back toward the comet’s surface, where it could collide with rust or sand particles. Atoms of oxygen from the water could pair with atoms of oxygen from the rust or sand, creating O2.
The idea is plausible, says Paul Goldsmith, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. He helped discover O2 in the Orion nebula and says the reaction might happen in places where young stars are forming and in other regions of space.
Rosetta mission scientist Kathrin Altwegg of the University of Bern in Switzerland calls the result interesting, but is skeptical it can explain comet 67P’s oxygen abundance. As the comet gets closer to the sun, a protective bubble develops around 67P, data from the mission showed; that bubble would prevent solar wind particles or other ionized particles from reaching the comet’s surface, Altwegg says. Also, the ratio of oxygen to un-ionized water also stays constant over time. It should be more variable if this chemical reaction were generating oxygen on the comet, she says.
Goldsmith, however, suggests researchers keep an open mind and design missions with instruments to test whether this newly detected reaction does, in fact, generate oxygen in space.
This year’s Atlantic hurricane season has already proven to be active and deadly. Powerful hurricanes such as Harvey, Irma and Maria are also providing a testing ground for new tools that scientists hope will save lives by improving forecasts in various ways, from narrowing a storm’s future path to capturing swift changes in the intensity of storm winds.
Some of the tools that debuted this year — such as the GOES-16 satellite — are already winning praise from scientists. Others, such as a new microsatellite system aiming to improve measurements of hurricane intensity and a highly anticipated new computer simulation that forecasts hurricane paths and intensities, are still in the calibration phase. As these tools get an unprecedented workout thanks to an unusually ferocious series of storms, scientists may know in a few months whether hurricane forecasting is about to undergo a sea change.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s GOES-16 satellite is perhaps the clearest success story of this hurricane season so far. Public perceptions of hurricane forecasts tend to focus on uncertainty and conflicting predictions. But in the big picture, hurricane models adeptly forecasted Irma’s ultimate path to the Florida Keys nearly a week before it arrived there, says Brian Tang, an atmospheric scientist at the University at Albany in New York. “I found that remarkable,” he says. “Ten or so years ago that wouldn’t have been possible.”
One reason for this is GOES-16, which launched late last year and will become fully operational in November. The satellite offers images at four times the resolution of previous satellites. “It’s giving unparalleled details about the hurricanes,” Tang says, including data on wind speeds and water temperatures delivered every minute that are then fed into models.
GOES-16’s crystal-clear images also give forecasters a better picture of the winds swirling around a storm’s central eye. But more data from this crucial region is needed to improve predictions of just how strong a hurricane might get. Scientists continue to struggle to predict rapid changes in hurricane intensity, Tang says. He notes how Hurricane Harvey, for example, strengthened suddenly to become a Category 4 storm right before it made landfall in Texas, offering emergency managers little time to issue warnings. “That’s the sort of thing that keeps forecasters up at night,” he says. In December, NASA launched a system of eight suitcase-sized microsatellites called the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System, or CYGNSS, into orbit. The satellites measure surface winds near the inner core of a hurricane, such as between the eyewall and the most intense bands of rain, at least a couple of times a day. Those regions have previously been invisible to satellites, measured only by hurricane-hunter airplanes darting through the storm.
“Improving forecasts of rapid intensification, like what occurred with Harvey on August 25, is exactly what CYGNSS is intended to do,” says Christopher Ruf, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the lead scientist for CYGNSS. Results from CYGNSS measurements of both Harvey and Irma look very promising, he says. While the data are not being used to inform any forecasts this year, the measurements are now being calibrated and compared with hurricane-hunter flight data. The team will give the first detailed results from the hurricane season at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December. Meanwhile, NOAA has also been testing a new hurricane forecast model this year. The U.S. forecasting community is still somewhat reeling from its embarrassing showing during 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, which the National Weather Service had predicted would go out to sea while a European meteorological center predicted, correctly, that it would squarely hit New York City. In the wake of that event, Congress authorized $48 million to improve U.S. weather forecasting, and in 2014 NOAA held a competition to select a new weather prediction tool to improve its forecasts.
The clear winner was an algorithm developed by Shian-Jiann Lin and colleagues at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J. In May, NOAA announced that it would test the new model this hurricane season, running it alongside the more established operational models to see how it stacks up. Known as FV3 (short for Finite-Volume Cubed-Sphere Dynamical Core), the model divides the atmosphere into a 3-D grid of boxes and simulates climate conditions within the boxes, which may be as large as 4 kilometers across or as small as 1 kilometer across. Unlike existing models, FV3 can also re-create vertical air currents that move between boxes, such as the updrafts that are a key element of hurricanes as well as tornadoes and thunderstorms.
But FV3’s performance so far this year hasn’t been a slam dunk. FV3 did a far better job at simulating the intensity of Harvey than the other two leading models, but it lagged behind the European model in determining the hurricane’s path, Lin says. As for Irma, the European model outperformed the others on both counts. Still, Lin says he is confident that FV3 is on the right track in terms of its improvement. That’s good because pressure to work out the kinks may ramp up rapidly. Although NOAA originally stated that FV3 would be operational in 2019, “I hear some hints that it could be next year,” he says.
Lin adds that a good model alone isn’t enough to get a successful forecast; the data that go into a model are ultimately crucial to its success. “In our discipline, we call that ‘garbage in, garbage out,’” he says. With GOES-16 and CYGNSS nearly online, scientists are looking forward to even better hurricane models thanks to even better data.
Ice in space may break out the bubbly. Zapping simulated space ice with imitation starlight makes the ice bubble like champagne. If this happens in space, this liquidlike behavior could help organic molecules form at the edges of infant planetary systems. The experiment provides a peek into the possible origins of life.
Shogo Tachibana of Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, and colleagues combined water, methanol and ammonia, all found in comets and interstellar clouds where stars form, at a temperature between ‒263° Celsius and ‒258° C. The team then exposed this newly formed ice to ultraviolet radiation to mimic the light of a young star.
As the ice warmed to ‒213° C, it cracked like a brittle solid. But at just five degrees warmer, bubbles started appearing in the ice, and continued to bubble and pop until the ice reached ‒123° C. At that point, the ice returned to a solid state and formed crystals.
“We were so surprised when we first saw bubbling of ice at really low temperatures,” Tachibana says. The team reports its finding September 29 in Science Advances.
Follow-up experiments showed fewer bubbles formed in ice with less methanol and ammonia. Ice that wasn’t irradiated showed no bubbles at all.
Analyses traced spikes of hydrogen gas during irradiation. That suggests that the bubbles are made of hydrogen that the ultraviolet light split off methane and ammonia molecules, Tachibana says. “It is like bubbling in champagne,” he says — with an exception. Champagne bubbles are dissolved carbon dioxide, while ice bubbles are dissolved hydrogen. The irradiated ice took on another liquidlike feature: Between about ‒185° C and ‒161° C, it flowed like refrigerated honey, despite being well below its melting temperature, Tachibana adds.
That liquidity could help kick-start life-building chemistry. In 2016, Cornelia Meinert of the University Nice Sophia Antipolis in France and colleagues showed that irradiated ice forms a cornucopia of molecules essential to life, including ribose, the backbone of RNA, which may have been a precursor to DNA (SN: 4/30/16, p. 18). But it was not clear how smaller molecules could have found each other and built ribose in rigid ice.
At the time, critics said complex molecules could have been contamination, says Meinert, who was not involved in the new work. “Now this is helping us argue that at this very low temperature, the small precursor molecules can actually react with each other,” she says. “This is supporting the idea that all these organic molecules can form in the ice, and might also be present in comets.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Helper cells in the brain just got tagged with a new job — forming traumatic memories.
When rats experience trauma, cells in the hippocampus — an area important for learning — produce signals for inflammation, helping to create a potent memory. But most of those signals aren’t coming from the nerve cells, researchers reported November 15 at the Society for Neuroscience meeting.
Instead, more than 90 percent of a key inflammation protein comes from astrocytes. This role in memory formation adds to the repertoire of these starburst-shaped cells, once believed to be responsible for only providing food and support to more important brain cells (SN Online: 8/4/15). The work could provide new insight into how the brain creates negative memories that contribute to post-traumatic stress disorder, said Meghan Jones, a neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Jones and her colleagues gave rats a short series of foot shocks painful enough to “make you curse,” she said. A week after that harrowing experience, rats confronted with a milder shock remained jumpy. In some rats, Jones and her colleagues inhibited astrocyte activity during the original trauma, which prevented the cells from releasing the inflammation protein. Those rats kept their cool in the face of the milder shock.
These preliminary results show that neurons get a lot of help in creating painful memories. Studies like these are “changing how we think about the circuitry that’s involved in depression and post-traumatic stress disorder,” says neuroscientist Georgia Hodes of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. “Everyone’s been focused on what neurons are doing. [This is] showing an important effect of cells we thought of as only being supportive.”
Immune reactions against proteins commonly used as molecular scissors might make CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing ineffective in people, a new study suggests.
About 79 percent of 34 blood donors tested had antibodies against the Cas9 protein from Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, Stanford University researchers report January 5 at bioRxiv.org. About 65 percent of donors had antibodies against the Cas9 protein from Streptococcus pyogenes.
Nearly half of 13 blood donors also had T cells that seek and destroy cells that make S. aureus Cas9 protein. The researchers did not detect any T cells that attack S. pyogenes Cas9, but the methods used to detect the cells may not be sensitive enough to find them, says study coauthor Kenneth Weinberg. Cas9 is the DNA-cutting enzyme that enables researchers to make precise edits in genes. Antibodies and T cells against the protein could cause the immune system to attack cells carrying it, making gene therapy ineffective.
The immune reactions may be a technical glitch that researchers will need to work around, but probably aren’t a safety concern as long as cells are edited in lab dishes rather than in the body, says Weinberg, a stem cell biologist and immunologist.
“We think we need to address this now … as we move toward clinical trials,” he says, but “this is probably going to turn out to be more of a hiccup than a brick wall.”
