Science

from-recycling-to-food:-can-we-eat-plastic-munching-microbes?

From recycling to food: Can we eat plastic-munching microbes?

food supply, microbes, plastic, recycling, Science, syndication / /

breaking it down —

Researchers are trying to turn plastic-eating bacteria into food source for humans.

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From recycling to food: Can we eat plastic-munching microbes?

Olga Pankova/Moment via Getty Images

In 2019, an agency within the US Department of Defense released a call for research projects to help the military deal with the copious amount of plastic waste generated when troops are sent to work in remote locations or disaster zones. The agency wanted a system that could convert food wrappers and water bottles, among other things, into usable products, such as fuel and rations. The system needed to be small enough to fit in a Humvee and capable of running on little energy. It also needed to harness the power of plastic-eating microbes.

“When we started this project four years ago, the ideas were there. And in theory, it made sense,” said Stephen Techtmann, a microbiologist at Michigan Technological University, who leads one of the three research groups receiving funding. Nevertheless, he said, in the beginning, the effort “felt a lot more science-fiction than really something that would work.”

That uncertainty was key. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, supports high-risk, high-reward projects. This means there’s a good chance that any individual effort will end in failure. But when a project does succeed, it has the potential to be a true scientific breakthrough. “Our goal is to go from disbelief, like, ‘You’re kidding me. You want to do what?’ to ‘You know, that might be actually feasible,’” said Leonard Tender, a program manager at DARPA who is overseeing the plastic waste projects.

The problems with plastic production and disposal are well-known. According to the United Nations Environment Program, the world creates about 440 million tons of plastic waste per year. Much of it ends up in landfills or in the ocean, where microplastics, plastic pellets, and plastic bags pose a threat to wildlife. Many governments and experts agree that solving the problem will require reducing production, and some countries and US states have additionally introduced policies to encourage recycling.

For years, scientists have also been experimenting with various species of plastic-eating bacteria. But DARPA is taking a slightly different approach in seeking a compact and mobile solution that uses plastic to create something else entirely: food for humans.

The goal, Techtmann hastens to add, is not to feed people plastic. Rather, the hope is that the plastic-devouring microbes in his system will themselves prove fit for human consumption. While Techtmann believes most of the project will be ready in a year or two, it’s this food step that could take longer. His team is currently doing toxicity testing, and then they will submit their results to the Food and Drug Administration for review. Even if all that goes smoothly, an additional challenge awaits. There’s an ick factor, said Techtmann, “that I think would have to be overcome.”

The military isn’t the only entity working to turn microbes into nutrition. From Korea to Finland, a small number of researchers, as well as some companies, are exploring whether microorganisms might one day help feed the world’s growing population.

Two birds, one stone

According to Tender, DARPA’s call for proposals was aimed at solving two problems at once. First, the agency hoped to reduce what he called supply-chain vulnerability: During war, the military needs to transport supplies to troops in remote locations, which creates a safety risk for people in the vehicle. Additionally, the agency wanted to stop using hazardous burn pits as a means of dealing with plastic waste. “Getting those waste products off of those sites responsibly is a huge lift,” Tender said.

The Michigan Tech system begins with a mechanical shredder, which reduces the plastic to small shards that then move into a reactor, where they soak in ammonium hydroxide under high heat. Some plastics, such as PET, which is commonly used to make disposable water bottles, break down at this point. Other plastics used in military food packaging—namely polyethylene and polypropylene—are passed along to another reactor, where they are subject to much higher heat and an absence of oxygen.

Under these conditions, the polyethylene and polypropylene are converted into compounds that can be upcycled into fuels and lubricants. David Shonnard, a chemical engineer at Michigan Tech who oversaw this component of the project, has developed a startup company called Resurgent Innovation to commercialize some of the technology. (Other members of the research team, said Shonnard, are pursuing additional patents related to other parts of the system.)

From recycling to food: Can we eat plastic-munching microbes? Read More »

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Cards on the table: Are Butch and Suni coming home on Starliner or Crew Dragon?

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NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, seen in their Boeing flight suits.

Enlarge / NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, seen in their Boeing flight suits.

After months of consideration, NASA said Thursday that it will finally decide the fate of two astronauts on board the International Space Station, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, by this weekend. As soon as Saturday, the two crew members will learn whether they’ll return on a Starliner spacecraft in early September or a Crew Dragon vehicle next February.

On the eve of this fateful decision, the most consequential human spaceflight safety determination NASA has had to make in more than two decades, Ars has put together a summary of what we know, what we believe to be true, and what remains yet unknown.

Why has NASA taken so long?

Wilmore and Williams arrived at the International Space Station 11 weeks ago. Their mission was supposed to last eight days, but there was some expectation that they might stay a little longer. However, no one envisioned the crew remaining this long. That changed when, during Starliner’s flight to the space station, five of the 28 small thrusters that guide Starliner failed. After some touch-and-go operations, the astronauts and flight controllers at Johnson Space Center coaxed the spacecraft to a safe docking at the station.

This failure in space led to months of testing, both on board the vehicle in space and with similar thrusters on the ground in New Mexico. This has been followed by extensive data reviews and modeling by engineers to try to understand the root cause of the thruster problems. On Friday, lower-level managers will meet in a Program Control Board to discuss their findings and make recommendations to senior managers. Those officials, with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson presiding, will make a final decision at a Flight Readiness Review on Saturday in Houston.

What are the two options?

NASA managers will decide whether to send the astronauts home on Starliner, possibly as early as September 2, or to fly back to Earth on a Crew Dragon vehicle scheduled to be launched on September 24. To make room for Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, this so-called “Crew-9” mission would launch with two astronauts instead of a full complement of four. Wilmore and Williams would then join this mission for their six-month increment on board the space station—their eight-day stay becoming eight months.

How are Butch and Suni feeling about this?

We don’t know, as they have not spoken to the media since it became apparent they could be in space for a long time. However, based on various sources, both of the crew members are taking it more or less in stride. They understand this is a test flight, and their training included the possibility of staying in space for an extended period of time if there were problems with Starliner.

That’s not to say it’s convenient. Both Wilmore and Williams have families back on Earth who expected them home by now, and the station was not set up for an extended stay. Wilmore, for example, has been having to sleep in a science laboratory rather than a designated sleeping area, so he has to pack up his personal things every morning.

What does seem clear is that Wilmore and Williams will accept NASA’s decision this weekend. In other words, they’re not going to stage a revolt in space. They trust NASA officials to make the right safety decision, whatever it ends up being. (So, for that matter, does Ars.)

Why is this a difficult decision?

First and foremost, NASA is concerned with getting its astronauts home safely. However, there are myriad other secondary decision factors, and bringing Butch and Suni home on Dragon instead of Starliner raises a host of new issues. Significantly among these is that it would be devastating for Boeing. Their public optics, should long-time rival SpaceX have to step in and “rescue” the crew from an “unsafe” Boeing vehicle, would be terrible. Moreover, the company has already lost $1.6 billion on the Starliner program, and there is the possibility that Boeing will shut it down. NASA does not want to lose a second provider of crew transport services to the space station.

Cards on the table: Are Butch and Suni coming home on Starliner or Crew Dragon? Read More »

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Rocket Report: A ULA sale tidbit; Polaris Dawn mission is on deck

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Flying high —

“The idea is to learn as much as we possibly can about this suit.”

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India's Small Satellite Launch Vehicle launched for the third time this week.

Enlarge / India’s Small Satellite Launch Vehicle launched for the third time this week.

ISRO

Welcome to Edition 7.08 of the Rocket Report!  Lots of news as always, but what I’m most interested in is the launch of the Polaris Dawn mission. If all goes as planned, the flight will break all sorts of ground for commercial spaceflight, including the first-ever private spacewalk. Best of luck to Jared Isaacman and his crew on their adventurous mission.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

RFA One blows up a booster. The first stage of Rocket Factory Augsburg’s first orbital launcher was destroyed in a fireball during a test-firing Monday evening at a spaceport in Scotland, Ars reports. It’s a notable event for the European commercial space industry as the German launch startup aimed to send its first rocket into space later this year and appeared to be running ahead of several competitors in Europe’s commercial launch industry that are also developing rockets to deploy small satellites in orbit. BBC obtained video of the fiery explosion.

Now comes the hard work of an anomaly investigation … In a statement, RFA said there was “an anomaly that led to the loss of the stage” Monday evening. The company said no one was injured and reported that the launch pad had been “saved and secured.” This was the same rocket RFA planned to launch on its inaugural test flight. The hot fire test Monday was the first with all nine engines on RFA One’s first stage. “We are now working closely with SaxaVord Spaceport and the authorities to gather data and info to eventually resolve what happened,” RFA said. “We will take our time to analyze and assess the situation.” On Thursday, the cause was attributed to a turbopump fire. (submitted by SPHK_Tech, gizmo23, brianrhurley, Jay500001, and Ken the Bin)

Orbex says it’s targeting a 2025 launch, but get real. UK-based Orbex is now projecting a 2025 first launch of its small launch vehicle, the company’s chief executive told Space News recently. Phil Chambers, chief executive of the United Kingdom-based company, said the company was making progress on both its Prime small rocket and launch site at Sutherland Spaceport in northern Scotland. “We are shooting for a 2025 launch,” Chambers said but declined to be more specific about a launch date other than to say that the company wanted to avoid a launch in winter because of poor weather conditions. “But I do want it to be 2025.”

Shooting to be the first orbital launch success from the UK … There is an interesting detail in the story that caught my eye: “Vehicle subsystems are going through critical design reviews, with some flight hardware under construction.” Let’s be honest, if they’re still working through the critical design review process for subsystems, the chance of a launch in 2025 is zero, and honestly for a company founded in 2015 it should not provide much confidence that the company will ever successfully launch an orbital rocket. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

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SSLV makes its third launch. India successfully launched its third Small Satellite Launch Vehicle on Thursday, placing an Earth observation satellite into orbit and completing the solid rocket’s development process, Space News reports. The rocket carried the experimental Earth observation EOS-08 spacecraft into its intended 475-kilometer circular orbit for the Indian Space Research Organization.

Two for three … According to ISRO chairman S. Somanath, the successful completion of the SSLV’s development phase paves the way for technology transfer to Indian industry, enabling serial production and operational deployment of the SSLV. The first SSLV flight failed in August 2022 when an upper stage malfunction left its payloads stranded in a very low orbit. The second launch, in February 2023, was successful. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Indian firm plans suborbital launch. A Chennai-based startup, Space Zone India, plans to launch its Rhumi-01 suborbital rocket on Saturday from a mobile launcher. The hybrid vehicle, combining both solid and liquid rocket propellants, will carry three cubesats and 50 smaller picosats on its debut launch, the New Indian Express reports.

Seeking to recycle rockets … According to the company’s website, the Rhumi launch vehicle can reach an altitude of about 30 km. The three cubesats are designed to monitor and collect data on atmospheric conditions, including cosmic radiation intensity, UV radiation intensity, air quality, and more. The company said most of the rocket is designed to be recoverable and reused. (submitted by brianrhurley)

Sierra Space kicking the tires on ULA. Boeing and Lockheed Martin are in talks to sell their rocket-launching joint venture United Launch Alliance to Sierra Space, Reuters reports. A deal could value ULA at around $2 billion to $3 billion, sources told the publication. A potential deal would be an ambitious move for Sierra Space, spun off from Sierra Nevada in 2021 to focus on bringing to market its long-delayed Dream Chaser spaceplane. A deal with ULA could give the company a rocket, Vulcan, for uncrewed and potentially crewed launches of Dream Chaser.

A source believes the deal is unlikely … ULA has been up for sale, actively, for more than a year. Blue Origin and Cerberus Capital Management had placed bids in early 2023 for the company, but none of those offers resulted in a deal. I heard about Sierra’s interest last Friday, but the Reuters story came out before I could write something up. I will say, from the reporting I have been able to do, that the discussions between Sierra and ULA’s owners were serious and substantial. However, at this time, my best information indicates that a sale is unlikely to happen. The parents believe ULA is worth more than Sierra is willing to pay. Sierra would also need to borrow substantially to make any transaction happen. (submitted by Hacker Uno and Ken the Bin)

Rocket Report: A ULA sale tidbit; Polaris Dawn mission is on deck Read More »

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After months of mulling, NASA will decide on Starliner return this weekend

commercial crew, Commercial space, human spaceflight, international space station, NASA, Science, Space, starliner / /

Standby for news —

“The agency flight readiness review is where any formal dissents are presented and reconciled.”

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A high-resolution commercial Earth-imaging satellite owned by Maxar captured this view of the International Space Station on June 7 with Boeing's Starliner capsule docked at the lab's forward port (lower right).

Enlarge / A high-resolution commercial Earth-imaging satellite owned by Maxar captured this view of the International Space Station on June 7 with Boeing’s Starliner capsule docked at the lab’s forward port (lower right).

Senior NASA leaders, including the agency’s administrator, Bill Nelson, will meet Saturday in Houston to decide whether Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is safe enough to ferry astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back to Earth from the International Space Station.

The Flight Readiness Review (FRR) is expected to conclude with NASA’s most consequential safety decision in nearly a generation. One option is to clear the Starliner spacecraft to undock from the space station in early September with Wilmore and Williams onboard, as their flight plan initially laid out, or to bring the capsule home without its crew.

As of Thursday, the two veteran astronauts have been on the space station for 77 days, nearly 10 times longer than their planned stay of eight days. Wilmore and Williams were the first people to launch and dock at the space station aboard a Starliner spacecraft, but multiple thrusters failed and the capsule leaked helium from its propulsion system as it approached the orbiting complex on June 6.

That led to months of testing—in space and on the ground—data reviews, and modeling for engineers to try to understand the root cause of the thruster problems. Engineers believe the thrusters overheated, causing Teflon seals to bulge and block the flow of propellant to the small control jets, resulting in losing thrust. The condition of the thrusters improved once Starliner docked at the station when they weren’t repeatedly firing, as they need to do when the spacecraft is flying alone.

However, engineers and managers have not yet reached a consensus about whether the same problem could recur, or get worse, during the capsule’s journey back to Earth. In a worst-case scenario, if too many thrusters fail, the spacecraft would be unable to point in the proper direction for a critical braking burn to guide the capsule back into the atmosphere toward landing.

The suspect thrusters are located on Starliner’s service module, which will perform the deorbit burn and then separate from the astronaut-carrying crew module before reentry. A separate set of small engines will fine-tune Starliner’s trajectory during descent.

If NASA managers decide it’s not worth the risk, Wilmore and Williams would extend their stay on the space station until at least February of next year, when they would return to Earth inside a Dragon spacecraft provided by SpaceX, Boeing’s rival in NASA’s commercial crew program. This would eliminate the threat that thruster problems on the Starliner spacecraft might pose to the crew’s safety during the trip to Earth, but it comes with myriad side effects.

These effects include disrupting crew activities on the space station by bumping two astronauts off the next SpaceX flight, exposing Wilmore and Williams to additional radiation during their time in space, and dealing a debilitating blow to Boeing’s Starliner program.

If Boeing’s capsule cannot return to Earth with its two astronauts, NASA may not certify Starliner for operational crew missions without an additional test flight. In that case, Boeing probably wouldn’t be able to complete all six of its planned operational crew missions under a $4.2 billion NASA contract before the International Space Station is due for retirement in 2030.

FRR-eedom to speak

The Flight Readiness Review at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston will begin Saturday morning. Ken Bowersox, a former astronaut and head of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, will chair the meeting. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson will participate, too. If there’s no unanimous agreement around the table at the FRR, a final decision on what to do could be elevated above Bowersox to NASA’s associate administrator, Jim Free or to Nelson.

“The agency flight readiness review is where any formal dissents are presented and reconciled,” NASA said in a statement Thursday. “Other agency leaders who routinely participate in launch and return readiness reviews for crewed missions include NASA’s administrator, deputy administrator, associate administrator, various agency center directors, the Flight Operations Directorate, and agency technical authorities.”

NASA has scheduled a press conference for no earlier than 1 pm ET (17: 00 UTC) Saturday to announce the agency’s decision and next steps, the agency said.

Lower-level managers will meet Friday in a so-called Program Control Board to discuss their findings and views before the FRR. At a previous Program Control Board meeting, managers disagreed on whether the agency was ready to sign off that the Starliner spacecraft was safe enough to return its astronauts to Earth.

There’s one new piece of information that engineers will brief to the Program Control Board on Friday:

“Engineering teams have been working to evaluate a new model that represents the thruster mechanics and is designed to more accurately predict performance during the return phase of flight,” NASA said. “This data could help teams better understand system redundancy from undock to service module separation. Ongoing efforts to complete the new modeling, characterize spacecraft performance data, refine integrated risk assessments, and determine community recommendations will fold into the agency-level review.”

After months of mulling, NASA will decide on Starliner return this weekend Read More »

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COVID shot now or later? Just getting it at all is great, officials respond.

CDC, COVID-19, fda, flu, health, HHS, Infectious disease, respiratory virus, RSV, Science, vaccines / /

Viral defences —

As the summer wave peaks, officials are prepping for the coming winter wave.

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A 13-year-old celebrates getting the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in Hartford, Connecticut, on May 13, 2021.

Enlarge / A 13-year-old celebrates getting the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in Hartford, Connecticut, on May 13, 2021.

With the impending arrival of the 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccines approved yesterday, some Americans are now gaming out when to get their dose—right away while the summer wave is peaking, a bit later in the fall to maximize protection for the coming winter wave, or maybe a few weeks before a big family event at the end of the year? Of course, the group pondering such a question is just a small portion of the US.

Only 22.5 percent of adults and 14 percent of children in the country are estimated to have gotten the 2023–2024 vaccine. In contrast, 48.5 percent of adults and 54 percent of children were estimated to have gotten a flu shot. The stark difference is despite the fact that COVID-19 is deadlier than the flu, and the SARS-CoV-2 virus is evolving faster than seasonal influenza viruses.

In a press briefing Friday, federal health officials were quick to redirect focus when reporters raised questions about the timing of COVID-19 vaccination in the coming months and the possibility of updating the vaccines twice a year, instead of just once, to keep up with an evolving virus that has been producing both summer and winter waves.

“The current problem is not that the virus is evolving so much, at least in terms of my estimation,” Peter Marks, the top vaccine regulator at the Food and Drug Administration, told journalists. “It’s that we don’t have the benefits of the vaccine, which is [to say] that it’s not vaccines that prevent disease, it’s vaccination. It’s getting vaccines in arms.” When exactly to get the vaccine is a matter of personal choice, Marks went on, but the most important choice is to get vaccinated.

Estimates for this winter

The press briefing, which featured several federal health officials, was intended to highlight the government’s preparations and hopes for the upcoming respiratory virus season. The FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are urging all Americans to get their respiratory virus vaccines—flu, COVID-19, and RSV.

CDC Director Mandy Cohen introduced an updated data site that provides snapshots of local respiratory virus activity, national trends, data visualizations, and the latest guidance in one place. HHS, meanwhile, highlighted a new outreach campaign titled “Risk Less. Do More.” to raise awareness of COVID-19 and encourage vaccination, particularly among high-risk populations. For those not at high risk, health officials still emphasize the importance of vaccination to lower transmission and prevent serious outcomes, including long COVID. “There is no group without risk,” Cohen said, noting that the group with the highest rates of emergency department visits for COVID-19 were children under the age of 5, who are not typically considered high risk.

So far, CDC models are estimating that this year’s winter wave of COVID-19 will be similar, if not slightly weaker on some metrics, than last year’s winter wave, Cohen said. But she emphasized that many assumptions go into the modeling, including how the virus will evolve in the near future and the amount of vaccine uptake. The modeling assumes the current omicron variants stay on their evolutionary path and that US vaccination coverage is about the same as last year. Of course, beating last year’s vaccine coverage could blunt transmission.

COVID shot now or later? Just getting it at all is great, officials respond. Read More »

hydrogels-can-learn-to-play-pong

Hydrogels can learn to play Pong

active matter, chemistry, hydrogels, materials science, Physics, polymers, Pong, Science, smart materials / /

It’s all about the feedback loops —

Work could lead to new “smart” materials that can learn and adapt to their environment.

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This electroactive polymer hydrogel “learned” to play Pong. Credit: Cell Reports Physical Science/Strong et al.

Pong will always hold a special place in the history of gaming as one of the earliest arcade video games. Introduced in 1972, it was a table tennis game featuring very simple graphics and gameplay. In fact, it’s simple enough that even non-living materials known as hydrogels can “learn” to play the game by “remembering” previous patterns of electrical stimulation, according to a new paper published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

“Our research shows that even very simple materials can exhibit complex, adaptive behaviors typically associated with living systems or sophisticated AI,” said co-author Yoshikatsu Hayashi, a biomedical engineer at the University of Reading in the UK. “This opens up exciting possibilities for developing new types of ‘smart’ materials that can learn and adapt to their environment.”

Hydrogels are soft, flexible biphasic materials that swell but do not dissolve in water. So a hydrogel may contain a large amount of water but still maintain its shape, making it useful for a wide range of applications. Perhaps the best-known use is soft contact lenses, but various kinds of hydrogels are also used in breast implants, disposable diapers, EEG and ECG medical electrodes, glucose biosensors, encapsulating quantum dots, solar-powered water purification, cell cultures, tissue engineering scaffolds, water gel explosives, actuators for soft robotics, supersonic shock-absorbing materials, and sustained-release drug delivery systems, among other uses.

In April, Hayashi co-authored a paper showing that hydrogels can “learn” to beat in rhythm with an external pacemaker, something previously only achieved with living cells. They exploited the intrinsic ability of the hydrogels to convert chemical energy into mechanical oscillations, using the pacemaker to apply cyclic compressions. They found that when the oscillation of a gel sample matched the harmonic resonance of the pacemaker’s beat, the system kept a “memory” of that resonant oscillation period and could retain that memory even when the pacemaker was turned off. Such hydrogels might one day be a useful substitute for heart research using animals, providing new ways to research conditions like cardiac arrhythmia.

For this latest work, Hayashi and co-authors were partly inspired by a 2022 study in which brain cells in a dish—dubbed DishBrain—were electrically stimulated in such a way as to create useful feedback loops, enabling them to “learn” to play Pong (albeit badly). As Ars Science Editor John Timmer reported at the time:

Pong proved to be an excellent choice for the experiments. The environment only involves a couple of variables: the location of the paddle and the location of the ball. The paddle can only move along a single line, so the motor portion of things only needs two inputs: move up or move down. And there’s a clear reward for doing things well: you avoid an end state where the ball goes past the paddles and the game stops. It is a great setup for testing a simple neural network.

Put in Pong terms, the sensory portion of the network will take the positional inputs, determine an action (move the paddle up or down), and then generate an expectation for what the next state will be. If it’s interpreting the world correctly, that state will be similar to its prediction, and thus the sensory input will be its own reward. If it gets things wrong, then there will be a large mismatch, and the network will revise its connections and try again.

There were a few caveats—even the best systems didn’t play Pong all that well—but the approach mostly worked. Those systems comprising either mouse or human neurons saw the average length of Pong rallies increase over time, indicating they might be learning the game’s rules. Systems based on non-neural cells, or those lacking a reward system, didn’t see this sort of improvement. The findings provided some evidence that neural networks formed from actual neurons spontaneously develop the ability to learn. And that could explain some of the learning capabilities of actual brains, where smaller groups of neurons are organized into functional units.

Hydrogels can learn to play Pong Read More »

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Town urges curfew over mosquito-spread disease that kills up to 50% of people

CDC, curfew, deaths, Eastern equine encephalitis, eee, health, Infectious disease, massachusetts, mosquito, Oxford, Science, virus / /

“Critical risk” —

Eastern Equine Encephalitis is very rare in the US, but when it strikes, it’s bad.

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A mosquito collected to test for mosquito-borne diseases.

Enlarge / A mosquito collected to test for mosquito-borne diseases.

A small town in Massachusetts is urging residents to stay indoors in the evenings after the spread of a dangerous mosquito-spread virus reached “critical risk level.”

The virus causes Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE), which kills between 30 and 50 percent of people who are stricken—who are often children under the age of 15 and the elderly. Around half who survive are left permanently disabled, and some die within a few years due to complications. There is no treatment for EEE. So far, one person in the town—an elderly resident of Oxford—has already become seriously ill with neuroinvasive EEE.

EEE virus is spread by mosquitoes in certain swampy areas of the country, particularly in Atlantic and Gulf Coast states and the Great Lakes region. Mosquitoes shuttle the virus between wild birds and animals, including horses and humans. In humans, the virus causes very few cases in the US each year—an average of 11, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But given the extreme risk of EEE, health officials take any spread seriously.

On August 16, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health announced the state’s first case and declared a “critical risk level” in the four communities of Douglas, Oxford, Sutton, and Webster. These all cluster in Worcester county near the state’s borders with Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Curfew

While the state health department did not identify the man as a resident of Oxford, the town’s manager confirmed his residence in a memorandum Wednesday. The manager, Jennifer Callahan, reported that the man remains hospitalized. She also reported that a horse across the border in Connecticut had recently died of EEE.

Also on Wednesday, the four towns—Douglas, Oxford, Sutton, and Webster—issued a joint health advisory, which included a recommended curfew.

Last night, The Oxford Board of Health voted to adopt the advisory, according to the Boston Globe. The recommendation is for residents to avoid mosquito’s peak activity time. They should “finish outdoor activities before 6: 00 PM through September 30th, 2024 and before 5: 00 PM October 1st, 2024 until the first hard frost.” The advisory also recommends residents wear insect repellent, wear protective clothing, and mosquito-proof their homes.

Officials emphasized that the curfew is a recommendation, not mandatory. However, to use town properties—such as recreation fields—people will first need to file an indemnification form and provide proof of adequate insurance coverage to the town.

To date, there have been only three cases of EEE in the US this year. One in Massachusetts, one in Vermont, and the last in New Jersey. All three are neuroinvasive. The CDC says that about 30 percent of cases are fatal, while Massachusetts health officials report that about half of people who develop EEE in the state have died.

In 2019, there was a multi-state outbreak of EEE, leading to a high of 38 cases. Twelve of the cases occurred in Massachusetts, and six died.

Town urges curfew over mosquito-spread disease that kills up to 50% of people Read More »

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Astronomers think they’ve found a plausible explanation of the Wow! signal

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“I’m not saying it’s aliens…” —

Magnetars could zap clouds of atomic hydrogen, producing focused microwave beams.

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The Wow! signal represented as

Enlarge / The Wow! signal, represented as “6EQUJ5,” was discovered in 1977 by astronomer Jerry Ehman.

Public domain

An unusually bright burst of radio waves—dubbed the Wow! signal—discovered in the 1970s has baffled astronomers ever since, given the tantalizing possibility that it just might be from an alien civilization trying to communicate with us. A team of astronomers think they might have a better explanation, according to a preprint posted to the physics arXiv: clouds of atomic hydrogen that essentially act like a naturally occurring galactic maser, emitting a beam of intense microwave radiation when zapped by a flare from a passing magnetar.

As previously reported, the Wow! signal was detected on August 18, 1977, by The Ohio State University Radio Observatory, known as “Big Ear.” Astronomy professor Jerry Ehman was analyzing Big Ear data in the form of printouts that, to the untrained eye, looked like someone had simply smashed the number row of a typewriter with a preference for lower digits. Numbers and letters in the Big Ear data indicated, essentially, the intensity of the electromagnetic signal picked up by the telescope over time, starting at ones and moving up to letters in the double digits (A was 10, B was 11, and so on). Most of the page was covered in ones and twos, with a stray six or seven sprinkled in.

But that day, Ehman found an anomaly: 6EQUJ5 (sometimes misinterpreted as a message encoded in the radio signal). This signal had started out at an intensity of six—already an outlier on the page—climbed to E, then Q, peaked at U—the highest power signal Big Ear had ever seen—then decreased again. Ehman circled the sequence in red pen and wrote “Wow!” next to it. The signal appeared to be coming from the direction of the Sagittarius constellation, and the entire signal lasted for about 72 seconds. Alas, SETI researchers have never been able to detect the so-called “Wow! Signal” again, despite many tries with radio telescopes around the world.

One reason for the excited reaction is that such a signal had been proposed as a possible communication from extraterrestrial civilizations in a 1959 paper by Cornell University physicists Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi. Morrison and Cocconi thought that such a civilization might use the 1420 megahertz frequency naturally emitted by hydrogen, the universe’s most abundant element and, therefore, something an alien civilization would be familiar with. In fact, the Big Ear had been reassigned to the SETI project in 1973 specifically to hunt for possible signals. Ehman himself was quite skeptical of the “it could be aliens” hypothesis for several decades, although he admitted in a 2019 interview that “the Wow! signal certainly has the potential of being the first signal from extraterrestrial intelligence.”

Several other alternative hypotheses have been suggested. For instance, Antonio Paris suggested in 2016 that the signal may have come from the hydrogen cloud surrounding a pair of comets, 266P/Christensen and 335P/Gibbs. This was rejected by most astronomers, however, in part because comets don’t emit strongly at the relevant frequencies. Others have suggested the signal was the result of interference from satellites orbiting the Earth, or a signal from Earth reflected off a piece of space debris.

Space maser!

Astrobiologist Abel Mendez of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo and his co-authors think they have the strongest astrophysical explanation to date with their cosmic maser hypothesis. The team was actually hunting for habitable exoplanets using signals from red dwarf stars. In some of the last archival data collected at the Arecibo radio telescope (which collapsed in 2020), they noticed several signals that were remarkably similar to the Wow! signal in terms of frequency—just much less intense (bright).

Mendez admitted to Science News that he had always viewed the Wow! signal as just a fluke—he certainly didn’t think it was aliens. But he realized that if the signals they were identifying had blazed brighter, even momentarily, they would be very much like the Wow! signal. As for the mechanism that caused such a brightening, Mendez et al. propose that a magnetar (a highly magnetic neutron star) passing behind a cloud of atomic hydrogen could have flared up with sufficient energy to produce stimulated emission in the form of a tightly focused beam of microwave radiation—a cosmic maser. (Masers are akin to lasers, except they emit microwave radiation rather than visible radiation.)

Proving their working hypothesis will be much more challenging, although there have been rare sightings of such naturally occurring masers from hydrogen molecules in space. But nobody has ever spotted an atomic hydrogen cloud with an associated maser, and that’s what would be needed to explain the intensity of the Wow! signal. That’s why other astronomers are opting for cautious skepticism. “A magnetar is going to produce [short] radio emissions as well. Do you really need this complicated maser stuff happening as well to explain the Wow! signal?” Michael Garrett of the University of Manchester told New Scientist. “Personally, I don’t think so. It just makes a complicated story even more complicated.”

arXiv, 2024. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2408.08513  (About DOIs).

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CEO of failing hospital chain got $250M amid patient deaths, layoffs, bankruptcy

for-profit hospitals, health, health care, health care system, private equity, Science, steward / /

“Outrageous corporate greed” —

Steward Health Care System, run by CEO Ralph de la Torre, filed for bankruptcy in May.

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Hospital staff and community members held a protest in front of Carney Hospital in Boston on August 5 as Steward has announced it will close the hospital.

Enlarge / Hospital staff and community members held a protest in front of Carney Hospital in Boston on August 5 as Steward has announced it will close the hospital. “Ralph” refers to Steward’s CEO, Ralph de la Torre, who owns a yacht.

As the more than 30 hospitals in the Steward Health Care System scrounged for cash to cover supplies, shuttered pediatric and neonatal units, closed maternity wards, laid off hundreds of health care workers, and put patients in danger, the system paid out at least $250 million to its CEO and his companies, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

The newly revealed financial details bring yet more scrutiny to Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre, a Harvard University-trained cardiac surgeon who, in 2020, took over majority ownership of Steward from the private equity firm Cerberus. De la Torre and his companies were reportedly paid at least $250 million since that takeover. In May, Steward, which has hospitals in eight states, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Critics—including members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP)—allege that de la Torre and stripped the system’s hospitals of assets, siphoned payments from them, and loaded them with debt, all while reaping huge payouts that made him obscenely wealthy.

Alleged greed

For instance, de la Torre sold the land under the system’s hospitals to a large hospital landlord, Medical Properties Trust, leaving Steward hospitals on the hook for large rent payments. Under de la Torre’s leadership, Steward also paid a management consulting firm $30 million a year to “provide executive oversight and overall strategic directive.” But, de la Torre was the majority owner of the consulting firm, which also employed other Steward executives. As the WSJ put it, Steward “effectively paid its CEO’s firm, which employed Steward executives, for executive- management services for Steward.”

In 2021, while the COVID-19 pandemic strained hospitals, Steward distributed $111 million to shareholders. With de la Torre owning 73 percent of the company at the time, his share would have been around $81 million, the WSJ reported. That year, de la Torre bought a 190-foot yacht for $40 million. He also owns a $15 million custom-made luxury fishing boat called Jaruco. The Senate Help Committee, meanwhile, notes that a Steward affiliate owned two jets, one valued at $62 million and a second “backup” jet valued at $33 million.

In 2022, de la Torre got married in an elaborate wedding on Italy’s Amalfi Coast and bought a 500-acre Texas ranch for at least $7.2 million. His new wife, Nicole Acosta, 29, is a competitive equestrian who trains at a facility near the ranch. She competes on a horse that was sold in 2014 for $3.5 million, though it’s unclear how much the couple paid for it. Besides the ranch, de la Torre, 58, owns an 11,108-square-foot mansion in Dallas valued at $7.2 million, the WSJ reported.

While de la Torre was living a lavish lifestyle, Steward hospitals faced dire situations—as they had been for years. An investigation by the Senate HELP committee noted that Steward had shut down several hospitals in Massachusetts, Ohio, Arizona, and Texas between 2014 and this year, laying off thousands of health care workers and leaving communities in the lurch. It closed several pediatric wards in Massachusetts and Texas; in Florida, it closed neonatal units and eliminated maternity services. In Louisiana, Steward patients faced “immediate jeopardy.”

“Third-world medicine”

In a July hearing, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), ranking member of the HELP Committee, spoke of the conditions at Glenwood Regional Medical Center in West Monroe, Louisiana, which Steward allegedly mismanaged. “According to a report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a physician at Glenwood told a Louisiana state inspector that the hospital was performing ‘third-world medicine,'” Cassidy said.

Further, “one patient died while waiting for a transfer to another hospital because Glenwood did not have the resources to treat them,” the Senator said.  “Unfortunately, Glenwood is not unique,” he went on. “At a Steward-owned Massachusetts hospital, a woman died after giving birth when doctors realized mid-surgery that the supplies needed to treat her were previously repossessed due to Steward’s financial troubles.” The hospital reportedly owed the supplier $2.5 million in unpaid bills.

Additionally, the WSJ investigation dug up records that showed that a pest control company discovered 3,000 bats living in one of Steward’s Florida hospitals. In Arizona, a Phoenix-area hospital was without air conditioning during scorching temperatures, and its kitchen was closed for health-code violations. The state ordered it to shut down last week.

“Dr. de la Torre and his executive teams’ poor financial decisions and gross mismanagement of its hospitals is shocking,” Cassidy said. “Patients’ lives are at risk. The American people deserve answers.”

Outrage

Senate HELP Committee chair Bernie Sanders (I-VT) went further, saying that the US health care system “is designed not to make patients well, but to make health care executives and stockholders extraordinarily wealthy. … Perhaps more than anyone else in America, Ralph de la Torre, the CEO of Steward Health Care, epitomizes the type of outrageous corporate greed that is permeating throughout our for-profit health care system.”

Sanders lamented how de la Torre’s payouts could have instead benefited patients and communities, asking: “How many of Steward’s hospitals could have been prevented from closing down, how many lives could have been saved, how many health care workers would still have their jobs if Dr. de la Torre spent $150 million on high-quality health care instead of a yacht, two private jets and a luxury fishing boat?”

On July 25, the committee voted 16–4 to subpoena de la Torre so they could ask him such questions in person. To date, de la Torre has refused to voluntarily appear before the committee and declined to comment on the WSJ report. The committee’s vote marks the first time since 1981 that it has issued a subpoena.

Separately, Steward and de la Torre are under investigation by the Department of Justice over allegations of fraud and corruption in a deal to run hospitals in Malta.

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How accurate are wearable fitness trackers? Less than you might think

health, health tracker, health tracking, Science, syndication, Tech / /

some misleading metrics —

Wide variance underscores need for a standardized approach to validation of devices.

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How accurate are wearable fitness trackers? Less than you might think

Corey Gaskin

Back in 2010, Gary Wolf, then the editor of Wired magazine, delivered a TED talk in Cannes called “the quantified self.” It was about what he termed a “new fad” among tech enthusiasts. These early adopters were using gadgets to monitor everything from their physiological data to their mood and even the number of nappies their children used.

Wolf acknowledged that these people were outliers—tech geeks fascinated by data—but their behavior has since permeated mainstream culture.

From the smartwatches that track our steps and heart rate, to the fitness bands that log sleep patterns and calories burned, these gadgets are now ubiquitous. Their popularity is emblematic of a modern obsession with quantification—the idea that if something isn’t logged, it doesn’t count.

At least half the people in any given room are likely wearing a device, such as a fitness tracker, that quantifies some aspect of their lives. Wearables are being adopted at a pace reminiscent of the mobile phone boom of the late 2000s.

However, the quantified self movement still grapples with an important question: Can wearable devices truly measure what they claim to?

Along with my colleagues Maximus Baldwin, Alison Keogh, Brian Caulfield, and Rob Argent, I recently published an umbrella review (a systematic review of systematic reviews) examining the scientific literature on whether consumer wearable devices can accurately measure metrics like heart rate, aerobic capacity, energy expenditure, sleep, and step count.

At a surface level, our results were quite positive. Accepting some error, wearable devices can measure heart rate with an error rate of plus or minus 3 percent, depending on factors like skin tone, exercise intensity, and activity type. They can also accurately measure heart rate variability and show good sensitivity and specificity for detecting arrhythmia, a problem with the rate of a person’s heartbeat.

Additionally, they can accurately estimate what’s known as cardiorespiratory fitness, which is how the circulatory and respiratory systems supply oxygen to the muscles during physical activity. This can be quantified by something called VO2Max, which is a measure of how much oxygen your body uses while exercising.

The ability of wearables to accurately measure this is better when those predictions are generated during exercise (rather than at rest). In the realm of physical activity, wearables generally underestimate step counts by about 9 percent.

Challenging endeavour

However, discrepancies were larger for energy expenditure (the number of calories you burn when exercising) with error margins ranging from minus-21.27 percent to 14.76 percent, depending on the device used and the activity undertaken.

Results weren’t much better for sleep. Wearables tend to overestimate total sleep time and sleep efficiency, typically by more than 10 percent. They also tend to underestimate sleep onset latency (a lag in getting to sleep) and wakefulness after sleep onset. Errors ranged from 12 percent to 180 percent, compared to the gold standard measurements used in sleep studies, known as polysomnography.

The upshot is that, despite the promising capabilities of wearables, we found conducting and synthesizing research in this field to be very challenging. One hurdle we encountered was the inconsistent methodologies employed by different research groups when validating a given device.

This lack of standardization leads to conflicting results and makes it difficult to draw definitive conclusions about a device’s accuracy. A classic example from our research: one study might assess heart rate accuracy during high-intensity interval training, while another focuses on sedentary activities, leading to discrepancies that can’t be easily reconciled.

Other issues include varying sample sizes, participant demographics, and experimental conditions—all of which add layers of complexity to the interpretation of our findings.

What does it mean for me?

Perhaps most importantly, the rapid pace at which new wearable devices are released exacerbates these issues. With most companies following a yearly release cycle, we and other researchers find it challenging to keep up. The timeline for planning a study, obtaining ethical approval, recruiting and testing participants, analyzing results, and publishing can often exceed 12 months.

By the time a study is published, the device under investigation is likely to already be obsolete, replaced by a newer model with potentially different specifications and performance characteristics. This is demonstrated by our finding that less than 5 percent of the consumer wearables that have been released to date have been validated for the range of physiological signals they purport to measure.

What do our results mean for you? As wearable technologies continue to permeate various facets of health and lifestyle, it is important to approach manufacturers’ claims with a healthy dose of skepticism. Gaps in research, inconsistent methodologies, and the rapid pace of new device releases underscore the need for a more formalized and standardized approach to the validation of devices.

The goal here would be to foster collaborative synergies between formal certification bodies, academic research consortia, popular media influencers, and the industry so that we can augment the depth and reach of wearable technology evaluation.

Efforts are already underway to establish a collaborative network that can foster a richer, multifaceted dialogue that resonates with a broad spectrum of stakeholders—ensuring that wearables are not just innovative gadgets but reliable tools for health and wellness.The Conversation

Cailbhe Doherty, assistant professor in the School of Public Health, Physiotherapy and Sports Science, University College Dublin. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Against all odds, an asteroid mining company appears to be making headway

asteroid mining, Science, Space / /

Forging ahead —

“It’s not easy to ever raise for an asteroid mining company, right?”

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The Odin spacecraft passed vibration testing.

Enlarge / The Odin spacecraft passed vibration testing.

Astro Forge

When I first spoke with space entrepreneurs Jose Acain and Matt Gialich a little more than two years ago, I wondered whether I would ever talk to them again.

That is not meant to be offensive; rather, it is a reflection of the fact that the business they entered into—mining asteroids for platinum and other precious metals—is a perilous one. To date, NASA and other space agencies have spent billions of dollars returning a few grams of rocky material from asteroids. Humanity has never visited a metal-rich asteroid, although that will finally change with NASA’s $1.4 billion Psyche mission in 2029. And so commercial asteroid mining seems like a stretch, and indeed, other similarly minded startups have come and gone.

But it turns out that I did hear from Acain and Gialich again about their asteroid mining venture, AstroForge. On Tuesday the co-founders announced that they have successfully raised $40 million in Series A funding and shared plans for their next two missions. AstroForge has now raised a total of $55 million to date.

“It was challenging,” Gialich said of the latest fundraising effort, in an interview. “It’s not easy to ever raise for an asteroid mining company, right? Let’s be honest. We talked two years ago and you told us this. And you were not wrong. So a big part of this funding round was just showing people that we can actually build a spacecraft.”

Making some mistakes

In April 2023, the company launched a shoebox-sized cubesat, named the Brokkr-1 mission, on a SpaceX Transporter flight. Although the vehicle flew as intended for a while, AstroForge was unable to send the necessary commands to the spacecraft to initiate a demonstration of its space-based refining technology.

However, Gialich said AstroForge learned a lot from this mission and is working toward launching a second spacecraft named Odin. This will be a rideshare payload on the Intuitive Machines-2 mission, which is due to launch during the fourth quarter of this year. If successful, the Odin mission would be spectacular. About seven months after launching, Odin will attempt to fly by a near-Earth, metallic-rich asteroid while capturing images and taking data—truly visiting terra incognita. Odin would also be the first private mission to fly by a body in the Solar System beyond the Moon.

It has not been an easy project to develop. In the name of expediency, AstroForge initially sought to develop this spacecraft by largely outsourcing key components from suppliers—a practice known as horizontal integration. However, in March, the Odin spacecraft failed vibration testing. “Originally, our concept was to be different than SpaceX, and be horizontally integrated, not vertical,” Gialich said. “That was completely wrong. We have very much made changes there to be vertical.”

After the original vehicle failed vibration testing, which ensures it can survive the rigors of launch, AstroForge decided to bring forward a spacecraft being developed internally for the company’s third flight and use that for the Odin mission. To remain on track for a launch this year, the company had to complete vibration testing of the new, 100-kg Odin vehicle by August 1. AstroForge made that deadline but still must complete several other tests before shipping Odin to the launch pad.

Docking with an asteroid

On Tuesday, the company also announced plans for its third mission, Vestri (the company is naming its missions after Norse deities). This spacecraft will be about twice as large as Odin and is intended to return to the targeted metallic asteroid and dock with it. The docking mechanism is simple—since the asteroid is likely to be iron-rich, Vestri will use magnets to attach itself.

The plan is to use a mass spectrometer to sample and characterize the asteroid weekly until the spacecraft fails. AstroForge seeks to launch Vestri on another Intuitive Machines mission in 2025. Vestri’s goals are highly ambitious, as no private spacecraft has ever landed on a body beyond the Moon.

AstroForge is tracking several candidate asteroids as the target body for Odin and Vestri, Gialich said, each of which is about 400 meters across. He won’t make a final decision for several months. The company does not want to tip its hand due to the interest of potential competitors, including China-based Origin Space.

However, there is no shortage of potential targets. Scientists estimate that there are about 10 million near-Earth asteroids, which come within one astronomical unit (the distance between the Sun and Earth) of our planet. Perhaps 3 to 5 percent of these are rich in metals, so there are potentially hundreds of thousands of candidates for mining.

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That book is poison: Even more Victorian covers found to contain toxic dyes

arsenic, chemistry, poison book project, Science, spectroscopy, toxic pigments, x-ray diffraction, x-ray fluorescence / /

Arsenic and old books —

Old books with toxic dyes may be in universities, public libraries, private collections.

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Composite image showing color variation of emerald green bookcloth on book spines, likely a result of air pollution

Enlarge / Composite image showing color variation of emerald green bookcloth on book spines, likely a result of air pollution

In April, the National Library of France removed four 19th century books, all published in Great Britain, from its shelves because the covers were likely laced with arsenic. The books have been placed in quarantine for further analysis to determine exactly how much arsenic is present. It’s part of an ongoing global effort to test cloth-bound books from the 19th and early 20th centuries because of the common practice of using toxic dyes during that period.

Chemists from Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, have also been studying Victorian books from that university’s library collection in order to identify and quantify levels of poisonous substances in the covers. They reported their initial findings this week at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Denver. Using a combination of spectroscopic techniques, they found that several books had lead concentrations more than twice the limit imposed by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

The Lipscomb effort was inspired by the University of Delaware’s Poison Book Project, established in 2019 as an interdisciplinary crowdsourced collaboration between university scientists and the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library. The initial objective was to analyze all the Victorian-era books in the Winterthur circulating and rare books collection for the presence of an arsenic compound called cooper acetoarsenite, an emerald green pigment that was very popular at the time to dye wallpaper, clothing, and cloth book covers. Book covers dyed with chrome yellow—favored by Vincent van Gogh— aka lead chromate, were also examined, and the project’s scope has since expanded worldwide.

The Poison Book Project is ongoing, but 50 percent of the 19th century cloth-case bindings tested so far contain lead in the cloth across a range of colors, as well as other highly toxic heavy metals: arsenic, chromium, and mercury. The French National Library’s affected books included the two-volume Ballads of Ireland by Edward Hayes (1855), an anthology of translated Romanian poetry (1856), and the Royal Horticultural Society’s book from 1862–1863.

Levels were especially high in those bindings that contain chrome yellow. However, the project researchers also determined that, for the moment at least, the chromium and lead in chrome yellow dyed book covers are still bound to the cloth. The emerald green pigment, on the other hand, is highly “friable,” meaning that the particles break apart under even small amounts of stress or friction, like rubbing or brushing up against the surface—and that pigment dust is hazardous to human health, particularly if inhaled.

Lipscomb University undergraduate Leila Ais cuts a sample from a book cover to test for toxic dyes.

Enlarge / Lipscomb University undergraduate Leila Ais cuts a sample from a book cover to test for toxic dyes.

Kristy Jones

The project lists several recommendations for the safe handling and storage of such books, such as wearing nitrile gloves—prolonged direct contact with arsenical green pigment, for instance, can lead to skin lesions and skin cancer—and not eating, drinking, biting one’s fingernails or touching one’s face during handling, as well as washing hands thoroughly and wiping down surfaces. Arsenical green books should be isolated for storage and removed from circulating collections, if possible. And professional conservators should work under a chemical fume hood to limit their exposure to arsenical pigment dust.

X-ray diffraction marks the spot

In 2022, Libscomb librarians heard about the Poison Book Project and approached the chemistry department about conducting a similar analytical survey of the 19th century books in the Beaman Library. “These old books with toxic dyes may be in universities, public libraries, and private collections,” said Abigail Hoermann, an undergraduate studying chemistry at Lipscomb University who is among those involved in the effort, led by chemistry professor Joseph Weinstein-Webb. “So, we want to find a way to make it easy for everyone to be able to find what their exposure is to these books, and how to safely store them.”

The team relied upon X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to conduct a broad survey of the collection to determine the presence of arsenic or other heavy metals in the covers, followed by plasma optical emission spectroscopy to measure the concentrations in snipped samples from book covers where such poisons were found. They also took their analysis one step further by using X-ray diffraction to identify the specific pigment molecules within the detected toxic metals.

The results so far: Lead and chromium were present in several books in the Lipscomb collection, with high levels of lead and chromium in some of those samples. The highest lead level measured was more than twice the CDC limit, while the highest chromium concentration was six times the limit.

The Lipscomb library decided to seal any colored 19th century books not yet tested in plastic for storage pending analysis. Those books, now known to have covers colored with dangerous dyes, have been removed from public circulation and also sealed in plastic bags, per Poison Book Project recommendations.

The XRD testing showed that lead(II) chromate was present in a few of those heavy metals as well—a compound of the chrome yellow pigment. In fact, they were surprised to find that the book covers contained far more lead than chromium, given that there are equal amounts of both in lead(II) chromate. Further research is needed, but the working hypothesis is that there may be other lead-based pigments—lead(II) oxide, perhaps, or lead(II) sulfide—in the dyes used on those covers.

That book is poison: Even more Victorian covers found to contain toxic dyes Read More »