A novel AI model known as CHIEF (Clinical Histopathology Imaging Evaluation Foundation), developed by researchers at Harvard Medical School, has been very accurate in diagnosing and forecasting the course of certain cancer types.

The study claims that CHIEF works better than current AI systems, reaching up to “96% accuracy” in the diagnosis of 19 distinct cancer kinds. The researchers compare CHIEF’s adaptability to that of ChatGPT, a language model that has drawn a lot of interest because of its capacity to handle a variety of jobs.

Instead of taking the generalist approach found in more conventional models like GPT-4V or LlaVA, CHIEF is essentially a highly specialized AI vision model—one that can comprehend visual inputs—trained to be extremely detailed in images of cancer cells.

Therefore, CHIEF was trained on a large multimodal dataset that included 15 million unlabeled photos and 60,000 whole-slide images of tissues from 19 different anatomical sites, rather than being trained to recognize generic elements like “cats” or “oranges.”

According to the study, “CHIEF extracted microscopic representations useful for cancer cell detection, tumor origin identification, molecular profile characterization, and prognostic prediction through pretraining on 44 terabytes of high-resolution pathology imaging datasets.”

The strategy appears to be more effective than expected. According to research senior author Kun-Hsing Yu, “our goal was to develop a quick, flexible AI platform that can carry out a variety of cancer evaluation tasks, similar to ChatGPT.” “Our model proved to be very helpful in a variety of tasks pertaining to the detection, prognosis, and response to treatment of various cancers.”

CHIEF surpassed state-of-the-art AI techniques by up to 36.1% on all tasks when tested on over 19,400 photos from 32 separate datasets gathered worldwide. It also was better at distinguishing between patients with high and low survival rates and could accurately offer information about various tissue samples that were tested.

To increase CHIEF’s accuracy, the researchers intend to train it on pictures of non-cancerous illnesses, rare disorders, and pre-malignant tissues. To improve the model’s ability to detect cancer aggressiveness and forecast the results of innovative treatments, they also expect feeding it additional data.

An Expanding Role in Cancer Detection and Beyond. For some time now, scientists have been using AI to improve cancer and other disease detection, diagnosis, and therapy.

For instance, Cambridge researchers unveiled EMethylNET, an AI model that has a 98% success rate in identifying 13 different forms of cancer using DNA information from tissue samples. Trained on over 6,000 tissue samples, EMethylNET demonstrates how AI may detect cancer early by detecting DNA methylation, which is a key factor in the development of cancer.

An earlier model called CancerGPT (I’m not making that word up) predicted how drug combinations could affect cancer patients’ unusual tissues using a huge language model. It proved that when structured data and samples are limited, pre-trained models can be quite helpful. CancerGPT can provide important insights by generalizing predictions and using previous medical research, but researchers were still worried about possible AI hallucinations.

Google and iCAD collaborated to improve cancer screening with AI. Their AI-powered approach improved accessibility to life-saving breast cancer screenings and exceeded professional radiologists in accuracy, providing a workable solution in the face of a global radiology deficit.

Lastly, brain surgeons are using another AI tool called Sturgeon to help them diagnose malignancies in the central nervous system in real time with 90% accuracy.
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CHIEF is open-source and may be downloaded from the project’s Github page, allowing researchers or anybody else to use it locally and add their own photos.

August saw the Gates Foundation and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office of the United Kingdom grant a $2.83 million grant to the British biotech business Legume Technology. AgFunderNews reports that the company intends to provide farmers in Africa with a cost-effective and safe way to enhance crop health and soil fertility with the additional cash.

Africa’s total soil fertility has declined over time, mostly because of excessive chemical fertilizer use that has sped up acidification.

Legume Technology has spent the last 20 years building bacterial and fungal microbial biofertilizerskeeping to fight that issue. These biofertilizers essentially create natural alternatives to chemical fertilizers by capturing nitrogen from the air and keeping it in the soil for the crops to absorb.

Redesigning the packaging as part of the company’s new strategy will enable more small-scale farmers to use biofertilizers in smaller containers.

Bruce Knight, a trained microbiologist who co-founded Legume Technology and serves as its managing director, said, “Within that small bag will be a microbe that has the power to transform the lives of millions of African smallholders by making their crops grow bigger and better, with more productive harvests, with no environmental side effects.”

Farmers have found it more and more difficult to sustain crop production in recent years. This is mostly because burning fossil fuels is causing air pollution, which is overheating our planet.

Certain places are no longer suitable for crops that are typically grown there because of the combination of changing climate conditions brought on by the overheating and unexpected extreme weather events.

Consequently, the development of innovative technologies that facilitate crop growth and food supply assurance for farmers while reducing their dependency on chemical fertilizers has become increasingly crucial. It has been shown that fertilizers have several downstream negative effects that eventually deteriorate ecosystem health.
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“Biologicals are the future of agricultural productivity,” Knight stated.

Russia attacked Ukraine thirty months ago, and during that time hundreds of thousands of buildings were destroyed. Soon, a new machine will start creating Lego-like building blocks for new dwellings out of some of that debris.

According to Nic Matich, a cofounder of Mobile Crisis Construction, an Australian charity that created the equipment, “the idea is to recycle and use what’s there.” Glass, garbage, and old walls are ground into a fine mixture in a mill and combined with water, clay, and cement in small amounts. After that, the device compacts everything into a block. After a few days of curing, the blocks are ready to be used to construct walls.

The blocks can be piled together with no traditional mortar because of their interlocking design. “With very little training, unskilled labor can put these walls together,” claims Matich. Rebar can be introduced through holes in the blocks in earthquake-prone areas.

The charity thinks that a single machine can create up to 8,000 bricks every day, which is enough to build 10 homes every three days. (That just refers to the exterior building; the interior residences still need to be completed.)

Cofounder Blake Stacey, an engineer with experience in brickwork, and crisis response specialist Matich began working on the idea five years ago after discussing a concept for interlocking blocks over drinks at a pub. “I thought, ‘What if we could move this around in a [shipping] container?’” recalls Matich. “Then we could rebuild and respond to crises.”

As soon as the design was complete, they began seeking money to respond to calamities such as earthquakes. However, Matich claims that because the news cycle is so fast, before they could gather the $70,000 or $80,000 required to create each machine, potential donors lost interest in each calamity. But there was increased sympathy for the current conflict in Ukraine. The machine is currently being transported in the first shipping container to a location outside of Kiev. (The freestanding mill is shipped in a smaller carton.) Unlike a conventional brick factory with a high-temperature kiln, the machine requires little power, allowing it to operate on a small generator even when the local grid is unavailable.

The first project involves rebuilding multiple townhouses in partnership with a local foundation. According to Matich, “it’s very simple construction, all in a row.” In a way, it’s a test case. To construct the next machine, the NGO has already begun to raise funds; according to him, there is “no upper limit on how much Ukraine needs.”
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The nonprofit eventually wants to be included in the typical reaction to tragedies. According to Matich, “the UN might send in food, water, and temporary shelters.” “And as a second phase response, we could deploy our machines and begin to rebuild the area.”

The enormous, rapidly receding Salton Sea, in the southeast of California, holds the key to the global future of clean energy. A new assessment from the U.S. Department of Energy claims this region contains an abundance of lithium, sufficient to power over 375 million electric vehicle (EV) batteries. This places the area as a potential powerhouse in the global lithium industry, surpassing the entire number of automobiles now on U.S. roadways.

For the creation of rechargeable batteries, which are used in everything from smartphones to electric cars, lithium is essential. This discovery appears to be a hopeful development given the global push for clean energy and the U.S. goal of increased energy independence. But as researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) warn, there could be serious negative effects on the environment and public health if America rushes to harvest lithium.

Manuel Pastor, the director of the USC Equity Research Institute, stated that “Lithium Valley” is currently positioned for a potential economic boom that is being supported not only by businesses but also by environmentalists who think the method of lithium extraction being proposed there is the “greenest” approach available. “But who will profit from the boom and who will continue to be marginalized?” is the real question.

Lithium from the Salton Sea is found in geothermal brine, which is hot, mineral-rich water below the surface. Comparing this form of lithium extraction to conventional hard rock mining, it is thought to be less harmful to the environment. Lithium may be collected from the brine by pumping it to the surface and then pumping the sans-lithium liquid back to the ground. This method is being heralded as a possible game-changer for environmentally friendly lithium production.

Australia presently produces more lithium than any other country in the world, mostly from hard rock mining. Major producers of lithium are also found in nations like China, Chile, and Argentina that harvest the metal from salt lakes. But now, the World Economic Forum reports, California’s Salton Sea is emerging as a major factor.

The concerns of depending on foreign suppliers for necessary elements like lithium, nickel, and cobalt—which power the batteries in electric vehicles (EVs) and electronic devices—have been brought to light by the epidemic and geopolitical tensions. According to World Bank projections, there will be a 500% increase in lithium consumption by 2050.

According to Greys Sošić, an expert in sustainability and global supply chains at the USC Marshall School of Business, “the U.S. needs to reduce the amount of lithium used in batteries and seek alternative local sources of lithium to enable sustainable future production from local resources.”

The Salton Sea’s proposed geothermal brine lithium recovery is one such option that might help fill the rising demand while lowering dependency on foreign lithium sources.

There is something peculiar about the Salton Sea, though. Because of an engineering blunder that occurred in 1905, it was unintentionally formed, and ever since, its dry lakebed has been exposing poisonous particles. Significant health concerns are associated with this dust, particularly for children in the nearby towns, who already face difficult economic and environmental conditions.

This is one of California’s poorest counties, with a typical household income that is about one-third that of Silicon Valley. While it boasts an 85% Latino population, but its political representation is far from up to par, according to Pastor.

The prevalence of childhood asthma in these neighborhoods is startlingly high. Air quality near the Salton Sea has been the subject of research by Shohreh Farzan, an associate professor of population and public health at the USC Keck School of Medicine, since 2017. According to her analysis, the childhood asthma rate in the towns surrounding the sea is 22%, which is higher than the national average of approximately 8%.

“The local air quality is probably a factor in the high rates we see, as many children in this area suffer from respiratory symptoms like wheezing and allergies,” Farzan said. “While lithium can help us become less dependent on fossil fuels, there is still much to learn about the environmental effects of the extraction process and whether this shift to cleaner energy could have an adverse effect on the health of the local communities.”

The Imperial Valley’s push for lithium mining reflects a larger global issue: balancing the pressing demand for clean energy and the necessity of safeguarding ecosystems and vulnerable communities. This was highlighted by Jill Johnston, an associate professor at USC’s division of environmental health.

“While promoting zero-emission technology and moving away from fossil fuels is vital for public health, it’s also necessary to prevent creating new environmental risks,” she stated. “The unduly burdened families around the proposed lithium extraction site deserve access to clean water and air and health protection.”
Imperial Valley faces a critical decision as the globe rushes toward a future powered primarily by renewable energy. Lithium mining has the potential to have a significant positive economic impact, bringing prosperity and jobs to an area that desperately needs them. However, it is impossible to overlook the health and environmental issues.
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The trick will be figuring out how to use the lithium in the Salton Sea while still taking care of the local ecology and population. “Lithium Valley” has the potential to serve as an example for sustainable resource exploitation if done well. If not, it might end up serving as just another illustration of how economic growth can neglect the most marginalized populations.

Pengju Li and his colleagues at the University of Chicago have created a wireless, ultrathin pacemaker that functions similarly to a solar panel by utilizing light. Because it conforms to the shape of the heart, its design reduces interference with the heart’s normal function while simultaneously doing away with the need for batteries. Their findings, which were just released in the journal Nature, provide a novel strategy for heart pacing and other therapies requiring electrical stimulation.

Medical devices called pacemakers are inserted into the body to control cardiac rhythms. They are made up of battery-operated electrical circuits with leads that are fixed to the heart muscle to stimulate it. Leads, however, can break and cause tissue damage. Once implanted, the leads’ position cannot be altered, which restricts access to various cardiac areas. Pacemakers might cause tissue injury when they are used in regulating arrhythmia or restart the heart after surgery because they use stiff iron electrodes.

The group’s aim was for a more adaptable, leadless pacemaker that could accurately stimulate various heart regions. Thus, they created a device that converts light into bioelectricity, or electrical signals produced by heart cells. The pacemaker is constructed of silicon membrane and optic fiber, which the Tian lab and colleagues at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have spent years developing. It is thinner than a human hair.

This pacemaker is driven by light, just like solar panels.

To accurately regulate heartbeats, they changed their device to create power only at points where light strikes, in contrast to normal solar cells, which are typically designed to capture as much energy as possible. A coating of minuscule pores, capable of capturing both light and electrical current, was employed to achieve this. Only heart muscles that are in contact with pores triggered by light are stimulated.

The gadget may be implanted without opening the chest because it is so lightweight and compact. It was successfully implanted, timing the beats of several cardiac muscles in the hearts of mice and an adult pig. Given the structural similarities between pig and human hearts, this achievement shows the device’s potential human application.

Why It Matters. Globally, heart disease is the primary cause of death. Over two million people have open heart surgery each year to treat cardiac conditions, including the implantation of devices that control cardiac rhythms and stave off heart attacks.

With its innovative, ultralight design, the heart’s surface may be gently conformed to for less intrusive stimulation, better pacing, and synchronous contraction. A minimally invasive procedure can implant the device, reducing postoperative trauma and recovery time.

What Still Isn’t Known. At the moment, ventricular defibrillation, heart attacks, and heart restarts are the situations in which the technique works best when used initially. The research team is still investigating its durability and long-term consequences in the human body.

The heart’s continuous mechanical action disturbs the body’s interior environment, which is rich in fluids. Over time, this can jeopardize the functionality of the device.

The body’s response to extended exposure to medical equipment is still not well understood by researchers. After implantation, scar tissue may grow around the device, reducing its sensitivity. To reduce the possibility of rejection, they are creating unique surface treatments and biomaterial coatings.

While silicic acid, a harmless material the body may safely absorb, is produced when the device breaks down, it is crucial to assess the body’s reaction to prolonged implantation to guarantee both safety and efficacy.

What’s Next? The rate at which the device dissolves naturally in the body is being fine-tuned by the researchers to accomplish long-term implantation and customize the device to each patient. To enable it to function as a wearable pacemaker, improvements are being investigated. This entails incorporating a wireless light-emitting diode, or LED, under the skin that is optically coupled to the apparatus.
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Their ultimate aim is to extend the use of what they refer to as photoelectroceuticals outside of cardiac treatment. This covers the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s disease with neurostimulation, neuroprostheses, and pain management.

Despite all the positive effects antibiotics have on the planet, one of the major drawbacks to their use is how they indiscriminately destroy both “bad” and “good” bacteria.

Besides eliminating disease-causing invaders in the human body, a single course of this life-saving medication can have an “immense“ effect on the gut and the microorganisms that live there.

Certain bacteria or fungi may occasionally overgrow because of this influence. For example, following antibiotic treatment, women may have a 30% chance of acquiring a yeast infection.

Researchers at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign are developing a remedy. Lolamicin is a novel antibiotic that has been found to target selectively gram-negative infections, sparing other bacteria.

Although there is still a long way to go until the medication is tested on humans, scientists are optimistic that it can act as a model for the creation of new antibiotics.

Gram-negative bacteria are notoriously hard to eradicate and are frequent causes of infections in the bladder, blood, lungs, and intestines. Currently, one of the most serious risks to global human health is their resistance to antibiotics.

Gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria can both be eliminated by broad-spectrum antibiotics. However, because gram-negative bacteria are more likely to be resistant to our current antibiotics, scientists believe it is imperative to develop medications that can target them specifically. This increases the likelihood that more bacteria beneficial to human health will survive.

A medication such as Lolamicin might be the solution. Lolamicin defeated 130 drug-resistant strains of common gram-negative bacteria, including K. pneumoniae, E. coli, and E. cloacae, in laboratory dishes. This medication was able to eradicate every single strain of drug-resistant bacteria, where many other antibiotics could not.

Lolamicin also effectively treated blood infections and acute pneumonia in living rodents, all the while protecting the gut microbiome.

The medication had “no effect on non-pathogenic gram-negative commensal bacteria or on gram-positive bacteria” that were living in the mice.

That’s an exciting finding, considering that the diversity of microbial species inhabiting the human gut can rapidly decline after even a brief treatment of antibiotics, and this can last for months before things return to normal.

Although the effects of those modifications on health are poorly understood, administering some antibiotics can make a patient more susceptible to secondary infections.

But Lolamicin isn’t like that. This novel drug does “not cause any substantial changes” to the gut microbiome of mice in the month following therapy, in contrast to gram-positive-only clindamycin and broad-spectrum antibiotic amoxicillin.

During this period, mice treated with Lolamicin were exposed to Clostridium difficile, a bacterial illness that frequently occurs in the colon after the use of antibiotics.

Those mice treated with Lolamicin did not develop C. difficile infections at nearly the same rate as those treated with clindamycin or amoxicillin.

The creation of an antibiotic that spares the microbiome could save lives, since the United States alone accounts for some 500,000 cases of C. difficile infections annually, of which 30,000 are fatal.

To make sure that infections do not eventually develop resistance to Lolamicin, scientists are currently refining their research.

“The intestinal microbiome is central to maintaining host health, and its perturbation can cause many deleterious effects, including C. difficile infection and beyond,” the authors conclude.
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“Pathogen-specific antibiotics such as Lolamicin will be critical to minimizing collateral damage to the gut microbiome; this microbiome-sparing effect would make such antibiotics superior for patients compared with antibiotics in current clinical practice.”

A business supported by Bill Gates named Graphyte is bringing the pipe dream of carbon capture one step closer to reality by burying bricks made of plant material.

The Washington Post described Graphyte's "deceptively simple" process for sequestering blocks of rice hulls and wood chips as "a game-changer" for the sector, which has been hindered by the high cost of alternative approaches.

"The approach, the company claims, could store a ton of CO2 for around $100 a ton, a number long considered a milestone for affordably removing carbon dioxide from the air," according to the publication.
According to the Post, the cost of direct air collection systems varies between $600 and $1,200 per ton in the US and Iceland.

Relying on renewable energy and electric power is tough for energy-intensive businesses like construction (which includes cement-making, a major global polluter) and aviation (which is developing sustainable fuels), according to the Post.

"We've bet the future of our planet on our ability to remove CO2 from the air," Chris Rivest, who is a partner at Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures, told the Post. "Pretty much every [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] scenario that has a livable planet involves us pulling like 5 to 10 gigatons of CO2 out of the air by mid- to late-century."

Thus, Graphyte's goal is to eliminate the natural process of plant decay, which releases atmospheric carbon back into the environment. To achieve this, they collect plant waste from farmers and lumber firms, compress, dry, and wrap it "into Lego-like bricks," then bury it 10 feet underground. The Post said that "with the right monitoring," the shoebox-sized bricks can stay there for a millennium.

The company, which claims to be the largest carbon removal factory in the world, inaugurated its first location in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in April in collaboration with nearby paper mills. It intends to become the world's largest carbon removal company by burying 50,000 tons of carbon dioxide next year.

According to The Post, Graphyte's straightforward strategy might work if it can find plant waste and build facilities of a similar nature around the country.
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Graphyte science adviser Daniel Sanchez told the Post, "People that are academics probably thought about this before and were like, 'That's way too simple." "'No one's ever going to do that.'"

The brain may be able to hold nearly 10 times more information than previously thought, a new study confirms.

Like computers, the brain’s memory storage is measured in “bits,” and the number of bits it can hold rests on the connections between its neurons, known as synapses. Historically, scientists thought synapses came in a few sizes and strengths, and this limited the brain’s storage capacity. However, this theory has been challenged in recent years—and the new study further backs the idea that the brain can hold about 10-fold more than once thought.   
 
In the new study, researchers developed a highly precise method to assess the strength of connections between neurons in part of a rat’s brain. These synapses form the basis of learning and memory, as brain cells communicate at these points and thus store and share information. 

Time in the brain doesn’t follow the steady ticking of the world’s most precise clocks.

By better understanding how synapses strengthen and weaken, and by how much, the scientists more precisely quantified how much information these connections can store. The analysis, published April 23 in the journal Neural Computation, demonstrates how this new method could not only increase our understanding of learning but also of aging and diseases that erode connections in the brain.

“These approaches get at the heart of the information processing capacity of neural circuits,” Jai Yu, an assistant professor of neurophysiology at the University of Chicago who was not involved in the research, said in a recent communication. “Being able to estimate how much information might be represented is an important step towards understanding the capacity of the brain to perform complex computations,” he added.

In the human brain, there are over 100 trillion synapses between neurons. Chemical messengers are launched across these synapses, facilitating the transfer of information across the brain. As we learn, transferring information through specific synapses increases. This “strengthening” of synapses enables us to retain the new information. In general, synapses strengthen or weaken in response to how active their constituent neurons are — a phenomenon called synaptic plasticity. 

However, as we age or develop neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, our synapses become less active and thus weaken, reducing cognitive performance and our ability to store and retrieve memories. 

Scientists can measure the strength of synapses by looking at their physical characteristics. Messages sent by one neuron will sometimes activate a pair of synapses, and scientists can use these pairs to study the precision of synaptic plasticity. In other words, given the same message, does each synapse in the pair strengthen or weaken in the same way? 

Measuring the precision of synaptic plasticity has proven difficult in the past, as has measuring how much information any given synapse can store. The new study changes that. 

To measure synaptic strength and plasticity, the team harnessed information theory, a mathematical way of understanding how information is transmitted through a system. This approach also enables scientists to quantify how much information can be transmitted across synapses, while also considering the “background noise” of the brain. 

This transmitted information is measured in bits, such that a synapse with a higher number of bits can store more information than one with fewer bits, Terrence Sejnowski, co-senior study author and head of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, said in an email. One bit corresponds to a synapse sending transmissions at two strengths, while two bits allow for four strengths, and so on.

The team analyzed pairs of synapses from a rat hippocampus, a region of the brain that plays a major role in learning and memory formation. These synapse pairs were neighbors, and they activated in response to the same type and amount of brain signals. The team determined that, given the same input, these pairs strengthened or weakened by the same amount, suggesting the brain is highly precise when adjusting a synapse’s strength.

The analysis suggested that synapses in the hippocampus can store between 4.1 and 4.6 bits of information. The researchers had reached a similar conclusion in an earlier study of the rat brain, but they’d crunched the data with a less-precise method. The new study helps confirm what many neuroscientists now assume—that synapses carry much more than one bit each, Kevin Fox, a professor of neuroscience at Cardiff University in the U.K. who was not involved in the research, said in a recent communication.   
 
The findings are based on a tiny area of the rat hippocampus, so it’s unclear how they’d scale to a whole rat or human brain. It would be interesting to determine how this capacity for information storage varies across the brain and between species, Yu said. 
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In the future, the team’s method could also compare the storage capacity of different areas of the brain, Fox said. It could also study a single area of a single brain region in both healthy and pathological conditions.

Since lithium is a component of electric automobiles, laptops, cellphones, and even nuclear fusion reactors, it is rapidly emerging as the most significant element of the future.

However, there are significant financial and environmental expenses associated with lithium extraction, so it’s exciting that a recent study shows that pyrite, sometimes known as fool’s gold, may be a viable supply of the metal.

Although the exact nature of the pyrite/lithium interaction is unknown, it could imply that both current and historical oil and gas activities are paradoxically sources of the very mineral intended to displace those fuels that release greenhouse gases.

One of the most significant elements in the periodic table is lithium. Lightweight and easily ion-gaining and -losing, the material is essential to batteries, which run nearly all our electronics.

However, lithium’s value extends beyond your iPhone. Breeding tritium, the hydrogen isotope at the center of nuclear fusion, requires lithium-6, an isotope of the soft metal. These factors, along with the rapidly approaching EV revolution and the pressing need for sustainable energy battery storage, are the main reasons the U.S. government views lithium, sometimes known as “White Gold,” as a crucial mineral.
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Despite all of its wonderful advantages, lithium has a few significant drawbacks. One reason for the lengthy lineups at airport security is that most lithium-ion batteries are like controlled bombs because of their extremely volatile nature. Additionally, it is difficult to remove because it hides in brine and igneous rock.

The globe is grappling with a massive plastic pollution catastrophe. The University of Texas at Austin has discovered an enzyme that consumes plastic, which could be a crucial breakthrough in combating the issue.
According to research, the amount of plastic produced worldwide has doubled in the previous 20 years, much of it being burned, dumped in landfills, or released into the environment, particularly the oceans.

Only 9% of plastic is successfully recycled, while 22% of plastic is mishandled, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Global Plastics Outlook report.

Teams of scientists and researchers are constantly dedicating time and resources to coming up with novel solutions to the expanding issue of plastic pollution in the world because plastic is not naturally biodegradable.

A machine learning (ML) method was developed by researchers at the University of Texas (UT) in Austin to produce a new type of enzyme that can break down plastic.

According to estimates from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), around 7 billion tons of plastic manufactured between 1950 and 2017 were disposed of as plastic garbage in landfills or discarded. Plastic trash has the potential to harm the environment seriously and its natural processes, fuel climate change, have an adverse effect on the livelihoods of millions of people, and reduce the world’s capacity to produce food. If chlorinated plastic is not disposed of or degraded properly, it can spread dangerous chemicals and affect ecosystems, groundwater, and the surrounding soil.

Human health and wellbeing might be affected by rising plastic pollution levels. It is thought by researchers that children are more likely than adults to be exposed to microplastics and their smaller equivalents, known as nanoplastics. Microplastics can also have negative health affects on children, such as inflammation and DNA damage. Adults who have persistent inflammation may require medical attention to get the care they need.

Plastic has negative effects on the ecosystem and the weaker animal populations that live in affected areas. To address the underlying causes of pollution, it is imperative to implement new technologies and provide substitute packaging because of the increasing quantity of plastic that is contaminating natural areas and waterways worldwide.

Hal Alper is the head of the engineering biology group at the University of Texas at Austin’s McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering. In addition, he holds the position of fellow and professor at UT’s Les and Sherri Stuewer Professorship in Chemical Engineering.

Alper and his group of scientists and engineers used machine learning (ML) to develop a hydrolase enzyme variation. One of the most widely used polymers in use today, PET (polyethylene terephthalate), may be broken down into its constituent components by the enzyme.

The PET polymer is most frequently seen in consumer packaged goods such as throwaway food trays and containers for drink, salad dressing, and fruit. A review published in the National Library of Medicine states that in 2021, PET packaging was responsible for 44.7% of single-serve beverage packaging in the US and 12% of solid trash worldwide.

However, PET plastic trash may be recycled to make brand-new PET materials when it decomposes, effectively establishing a circular plastics economy. Previous attempts at enzymatic degradation failed primarily because they were not strong enough against changes in pH, temperature, and reaction rates.

Alper and the UT Austin team discovered throughout the investigation that the unique plastic-eating enzyme, known as FAST-PETase (functional, active, stable, and tolerant PETase), can degrade polymers far more quickly than other PET hydrolases employed in earlier research. It can also break down products made of transparent and mixed-color PET plastic.

The novel FAST-PETase enzyme destroyed untreated, post-consumer PET from 51 different items almost entirely in just one week. The scientists also revealed that parts of a commercial water bottle and a complete thermally prepared water bottle may be broken down at 50C.

This new enzyme has practically endless potential to help many sectors reduce their trash because it can break down plastics so swiftly and extensively.

One of the biggest obstacles to many environmental cleanup projects is managing the outside temperature. Enzymatic breakdown is ineffective because the plastic-eating enzyme is temperature sensitive.

The FAST-PETase enzyme works well outside of laboratories because it can concurrently break down plastic and adapt to temperature changes. The groups who work to clean up the environment, such as environmental organizations, may benefit from this new revelation.

When present in sufficient amounts, the enzyme can cleanse waste facilities, landfills, and other locations adversely affected by plastic pollution. The plastic-eating enzyme is widely applicable, portable, and reasonably priced. In this research, machine learning plays a vital role. It is likely that the new enzyme discovery would not have been achieved without the model created by researchers at UT.
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The University of Texas team filed a patent to investigate the potential uses of this novel technology. The objective is to increase the FAST-PETase enzyme’s production to a larger scale for industrial and environmental applications. It will be fascinating to observe how this finding may be applied and whether it contributes to the solution to the plastic pollution problem.