Author: Truth & Hammer

China’s Chang’e-4 mission made history by landing on the far side of the moon, and now it’s exploring the area in unprecedented detail. As China’s Yuta-2 rover explores the surface, its lunar satellites are relaying back to Earth stunning pictures of this mysterious and hard-to-reach area.

The photo above was taken by Longjiang-2, a small satellite that a Chang’e-4 relay satellite unloaded on its way to the moon last May. Longjiang-2 is small, just under 100 pounds (45 kilograms) and is around 20 by 20 by 15 inches in size (50-50-40 centimeters). It was meant to be part of a pair with Longjiang-1, but its sibling malfunctioned and became inoperable. Now Longjiang-2 orbits the moon by its lonesome, testing out future radio astronomy and interferometry techniques (studying what happens when light, radio, electromagentic, and various other types of waves are met with interference).

Only one of the two microsatellites was outfitted with an optical camera developed by the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology of Saudi Arabia. Luckily for us, it was Longjiang-2.

The photo—the first photo with the moon’s far side and the Earth in the same shot—calls to mind the famed 1968 photo from Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders, “Earthrise.“

At the same time, the Yuta-2 lander is finding data that contradicts with the early Apollo testing of lunar soil. “According to the measurements of Chang’e-4, the temperature of the shallow layer of the lunar soil on the far side of the Moon is lower than the data obtained by the U.S. Apollo mission on the near side of the Moon,” says Zhang He, executive director of the Chang’e-4 probe project, speaking to China’s state media Xinhua. “That’s probably due to the difference in lunar soil composition between the two sides of the moon. We still need more careful analysis,” Zhang said.

It speaks to the chance that the moon’s far side and its Earth-facing side might possess different environments, starting with their ability to retain heat. Expect the data—and the photos—to keep rolling in.

The rose may be one of the most iconic symbols of the fragility of love in popular culture, but now the flower could hold more than just symbolic value. A new device for collecting and purifying water, developed at The University of Texas at Austin, was inspired by a rose and, while more engineered than enchanted, is a dramatic improvement on current methods. Each flower-like structure costs less than 2 cents and can produce more than half a gallon of water per hour per square meter.

A team led by associate professor Donglei (Emma) Fan in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering developed a new approach to solar steaming for water production—a technique that uses energy from sunlight to separate salt and other impurities from water through evaporation.

In a paper published in the most recent issue of the journal Advanced Materials, the authors outline how an origami rose provided the inspiration for developing a new kind of solar-steaming system made from layered, black paper sheets shaped into petals. Attached to a stem-like tube that collects untreated water from any water source, the 3-D rose shape makes it easier for the structure to collect and retain more liquid.

Current solar-steaming technologies are usually expensive, bulky and produce limited results. The team’s method uses inexpensive materials that are portable and lightweight. Oh, and it also looks just like a black-petaled rose in a glass jar.

Those in the know would more accurately describe it as a portable low-pressure controlled solar-steaming-collection “unisystem.” But its resemblance to a flower is no coincidence.

“We were searching for more efficient ways to apply the solar-steaming technique for water production by using black filtered paper coated with a special type of polymer, known as polypyrrole,” Fan said.

Polypyrrole is a material known for its photothermal properties, meaning it’s particularly good at converting solar light into thermal heat.

Fan and her team experimented with a number of different ways to shape the paper to see what was best for achieving optimal water retention levels. They began by placing single, round layers of the coated paper flat on the ground under direct sunlight. The single sheets showed promise as water collectors but not in sufficient amounts. After toying with a few other shapes, Fan was inspired by a book she read in high school. Although not about roses per se, “The Black Tulip” by Alexandre Dumas gave her the idea to try using a flower-like shape, and she discovered the rose to be ideal. Its structure allowed more direct sunlight to hit the photothermic material—with more internal reflections—than other floral shapes and also provided enlarged surface area for water vapor to dissipate from the material.

The device collects water through its stem-like tube—feeding it to the flower-shaped structure on top. It can also collect rain drops coming from above. Water finds its way to the petals where the polypyrrole material coating the flower turns the water into steam. Impurities naturally separate from water when condensed in this way.

“We designed the purification-collection unisystem to include a connection point for a low-pressure pump to help condense the water more effectively,” said Weigu Li, a Ph.D. candidate in Fan’s lab and lead author on the paper. “Once it is condensed, the glass jar is designed to be compact, sturdy and secure for storing clean water.”

The device removes any contamination from heavy metals and bacteria, and it removes salt from seawater, producing clean water that meets drinking standard requirements set by the World Health Organization.

“Our rational design and low-cost fabrication of 3-D origami photothermal materials represents a first-of-its-kind portable low-pressure solar-steaming-collection system,” Li said. “This could inspire new paradigms of solar-steaming technologies in clean water production for individuals and homes.”

The enzyme Nocturnin, which governs daily tasks such as fat metabolism and energy usage, works in an entirely different way than previously thought, reported a team of researchers at Princeton University. The newly discovered mechanism reveals the molecular link between the enzyme’s daily fluctuations and its energy-regulating role in the body, according to a study published this week in Nature Communications.

“The realization that Nocturnin works in this manner will guide our thinking about sleep, oxidative stress and metabolism, and eventually may serve as a step toward finding better treatments for metabolic diseases,” said Alexei Korennykh, an associate professor of molecular biology at Princeton, who led the work.

Nocturnin is part of the circadian clock that alters the metabolism and behavior of living organisms to match the body’s needs at different times of the day. For example, Nocturnin levels fluctuate throughout the day, dramatically peaking when the body first awakens. Nocturnin is also a critical regulator of metabolism; compared to regular mice, mice lacking the enzyme make less insulin, are protected from fatty liver disease and are less susceptible to weight gain.

The precise function of Nocturnin inside cells has remained unclear, however. For many years, the enzyme was thought to turn on and off cellular metabolism by degrading certain cellular messages made of ribonucleic acid, or mRNAs. Last year, however, three groups of researchers—a group from the University of Michigan, a group from the University of Minnesota, and Korennykh’s team—discovered that Nocturnin is incapable of degrading RNAs.

To find out how Nocturnin can have such large effects on the body’s metabolism, Korennykh teamed up with Princeton’s Joshua Rabinowitz, a professor of chemistry and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, and Paul Schedl, a professor of molecular biology. The study was led by postdoctoral research associate Michael Estrella and graduate student Jin Du in the Alexei lab, and postdoctoral research associate Li Chen in the Rabinowitz lab.

Using methods pioneered by Rabinowitz to screen tissues for the presence of metabolites, the researchers discovered that Nocturnin plays a far more direct role in metabolism than previously appreciated. Rather than degrading mRNAs, the enzyme regulates specific metabolites that help energy production and protect cells from damage. The study determined that Nocturnin is located in the cell’s energy-producing structures, the mitochondria, suggesting that this is where the enzyme performs its function.

The team found that Nocturnin removes a phosphate group from two molecules important in metabolism, called NADP+ and NADPH. These molecules allow the cell to modulate the levels of reactive oxygen species, which function both as harmful agents causing damage and as signaling molecules controlling metabolism and fat storage. The researchers conclude that Nocturnin is the first known enzyme to perform this reaction on NADP+ and NADPH inside mitochondria.

Removing phosphate groups from NADP+ and NADPH produces two different but equally important molecules, NAD+ and NADH, which are essential for the function of metabolic enzymes—the molecular machines that produce energy by breaking down energy-rich biomolecules such as glucose.

Nocturnin upregulation when an animal first awakens might therefore kick the body’s energy production into high gear by providing more NAD+ and NADH. “It is tempting to propose that one physiologic function of Nocturnin could be to maximize available NAD+ and NADH for energy generation in a search for food, using the elevated blood sugar that animals have at the time of awakening,” Korennykh said.

Korennykh and colleagues also deciphered the crystal structure of human Nocturnin bound to NADPH, showing at the atomic level how the reaction mediated by Nocturnin occurs. NADPH fits perfectly into Nocturnin’s active site so that the enzyme can easily remove the molecule’s phosphate group.

Finally, the researchers determined that the fruit fly version of Nocturnin, known as Curled, is also unable to cleave RNA. Instead, Curled uses the same mechanism as human Nocturnin and targets NADP+ and NADPH. The Curled gene was first described over 100 years ago by Thomas Hunt Morgan, the pioneering geneticist who won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating that genes are carried on chromosomes. Though Curled has been studied by fruit fly researchers ever since, its biochemical mechanism was a mystery until now.

“Our work shows that even in the age of genomics and personalized medicine, basic biology still remains to be understood,” Korennykh said. “In the example of Nocturnin and Curled, a pathway regulating some of the most important molecules in metabolism was hidden in plain sight for the past 100 years.”

The study, “The Metabolites NADP+ and NADPH are the Targets of the Circadian Protein Nocturnin (Curled),” by Michael A Estrella, Jin Du, Li Chen, Sneha Rath, Eliza Prangley, Alisha Chitrakar, Tsutomu Aoki, Paul Schedl, Joshua Rabinowitz and Alexei Korennykh, was published online in Nature Communications on May 30, 2019.