Danger Dust

In Short

• The surge in crashing of Starlinks is being blamed on the mass retirement

• The re-entries produce visually stunning fireballs

• Each Gen1 Starlink satellite produces about 30 kilograms of aluminum oxide

As SpaceX's Starlink constellation expands, what goes up must come down, leading to a notable increase in satellite deorbits.

Astronomers, tracking the objects in the sky noted that in January alone, over 120 Starlink satellites re-entered Earth's atmosphere, and burned up creating spectacular fireballs.

While the re-entries produce visually stunning fireballs, they also raise concerns about atmospheric pollution. The disintegration of satellites adds metallic vapours to the atmosphere.

A 2023 study found that 10% of aerosols collected 60,000 feet over Alaska contained aluminum and other metals from satellite burn-up.

A person’s ability to focus on everyday tasks is affected by short-term exposure to air pollution, a study has found.

Researchers analysed data from cognitive tests completed by 26 participants before and after they were exposed either to high levels of particulate matter (PM) using smoke from a candle, or clean air for an hour.

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, found that even brief exposure to high concentrations of PM affected participants’ selective attention and emotion recognition – regardless of whether they breathed normally or just through their mouth. This can affect an individual’s ability to concentrate on tasks, avoid distractions and behave in a socially appropriate way.

Paywall

Although the association between certain occupational exposures and the development of autoimmune rheumatic disease was first described over a century ago, this association has only become more widely recognized in the past 10 years because of the use of high-silica-content engineered stone in construction and home renovation.

There is now a substantial and growing body of evidence that occupational dust and chemical exposure, be it through mining, stonemasonry, building or other trades, increases the risk of various systemic autoimmune rheumatic diseases (SARDs) including rheumatoid arthritis and systemic sclerosis. Although the pathogenic mechanisms of silica-induced autoimmunity are not fully elucidated, it is thought that alveolar macrophage ingestion of silica and the ensuing phagosomal damage is an initiating event that ultimately leads to production of autoantibodies and immune-mediated tissue injury.

The purportedly causal association between occupational exposure to chemicals, such as organic solvents, and an increased risk of SARDs is less frequently recognized compared with silica dust, and its immunopathogenesis is less well understood.

An appreciation of the importance of occupational dust and chemical exposures in the development of SARDs has implications for workplace health and safety regulations and offers a unique opportunity to better understand autoimmune disease pathogenesis and implement preventative strategies.

Key points

• Occupational exposure to silica dust is associated with several-fold increased risk of systemic sclerosis and also of developing rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, small-vessel vasculitis and sarcoidosis.

• Occupational exposure to solvents is associated with an increased risk of systemic sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, and possibly other autoimmune diseases.

• There are a large number of occupations ranging from construction and mining to petrochemical, plastics and rubber industries wherein potentially harmful exposures to silica and solvents can occur.

• The pathogenesis of autoimmune disease related to occupational exposures is not fully elucidated but is likely to involve a key role for innate immune responses.

• Occupational systemic autoimmune rheumatic diseases present a unique opportunity for disease prevention through the generation of new scientific knowledge, advocacy, workplace health and safety policy, and legislation.

From 2020

Asbestos:

Asbestos is a highly toxic material that is present in insulation in many buildings. It is responsible for a variety of lung cancers that can cause lifelong adverse health effects in consumers.

Asbestos is particularly dangerous when it is disturbed, releasing microscopic particles in the air that are then breathed in and cause extensive damage to the human lungs. This is a slow process, with the initial exposure happening decades prior to the development of the final lung cancer.

Other commonly found chemicals:

There are other substances that are also frequent causes of lung cancer, including arsenic (used in the production of glassware, textiles, ceramics, and/or fireworks), diesel fumes, wood dust, silica (used in the production of electronics and/or semiconductors), vinyl chloride, bis (chloromethyl) ether, solvents like benzene and/or toluene, and various metals like aluminum, beryllium, and/or cadmium.

Exposure to any one of these substances, usually over a prolonged period of time, greatly increases the chances of you developing lung cancer. Most cases of lung cancer are the result of multiple exposures to smaller amounts of the carcinogen rather than a single, acute episode of a high amount.

From 2020

Thousands of new cases of serious ill health due to exposure to hazardous substances and fumes in the workplace have focused minds on the need for new best practice guidance for local exhaust ventilation (LEV)

After asbestos, the biggest cause of lung disease is exposure to silica, diesel and mineral oils.

There are approximately 8,000 deaths and 13,000 new cases of the workplace related cancer every year. There are also 12,000 deaths from respiratory disease and 18,000 new cases of breathing and lung problems linked to conditions at work, according to the Health & Safety Executive (HSE).

The development of AAV is a complex and multifactorial autoimmune process

The initial causes of AAV are currently unclear. Predisposing factors such as microbial infection, genetic influence, environmental agents and specific drugs are all fundamental to the development of AAV.

Exposure to silica, pesticides, fumes, construction materials, hydrocarbon (cleaning agents, paint, diesel), drugs (propylthiouracil, hydralazine, D-penicillamine, cefotaxime, minocycline, anti-TNF agents, phenytoin) and certain psychoactive agents may all cause AAV.

The proportion of people being diagnosed with lung cancer who have never smoked is increasing, with air pollution an “important factor”, the World Health Organization’s cancer agency has said.

Lung cancer in people who have never smoked cigarettes or tobacco is now estimated to be the fifth highest cause of cancer deaths worldwide, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

Lung cancer in never-smokers is also occurring almost exclusively as adenocarcinoma, which has become the most dominant of the four main subtypes of the disease in both men and women globally, the IARC said.

Rubies are mainly made up of the mineral corundum, which is composed of the elements aluminum and oxygen in a regular, repeating array. Each aluminum ion is surrounded by six oxygen ions.

Emeralds are mainly made up of the mineral beryl, which is made from the elements beryllium, aluminum, silicon and oxygen. Beryl’s crystal structure is more complicated than corundum’s because of the additional elements in the formula, but each aluminum ion is again surrounded by six oxygen ions.

Pure corundum and beryl are colorless. The brilliant colors of rubies and emeralds come from the presence of very small amounts of chromium. The chromium replaces about 1% of the aluminum in the corundum or beryl crystal when a ruby or emerald forms underground at a high temperature and pressure.

But how can one element – chromium – create the red color of a ruby and green color of an emerald?

Unlike the colorless aluminum ion, the chromium ion absorbs blue and green light when surrounded by the oxygen ions. The red light is reflected back, so that’s what you see in rubies.

In an emerald, even though the chromium is surrounded by six oxygen ions, there is a weaker interaction between the chromium and the surrounding oxygen ions. That’s due to the presence of silicon and beryllium in the beryl crystal. They cause the emerald to absorb blue and red light, leaving the green for you to see.

The amount of environmental plastic nano- and microparticles, which range in size from as small as 1 nanometer (one billionth of a meter) up to 500 micrometers (one millionth of a meter) in diameter, has increased exponentially over the past 50 years. However, whether they are harmful or toxic to humans is unclear. Most previous studies used visual microscopic spectroscopy methods to identify particulates in human tissues, but this is often limited to particulates larger than 5 micrometers.

The team detected these particles in all of the samples and found similar concentrations in the samples of liver and kidney tissues obtained in 2016. However, brain samples taken from that time, all derived from the frontal cortex region, contained substantially higher concentrations of plastic particles than the liver and kidney tissues.

The authors also found that liver and brain samples from 2024 had significantly higher concentrations of plastic micro- and nanoparticles than those from 2016.

Key findings

• Brain scans from people with ME/CFS and those with long COVID were analysed to determine the volumes of different regions of the hippocampus.

• The hippocampus is a brain structure involved in memory and learning.

• Compared with healthy control subjects, individuals in both patient groups had significantly larger volumes of several areas (subfields) of the hippocampus.

• Hippocampus subfield volumes were similar in ME/CFS and long COVID patients.

• These volumes also correlated with symptom severity for measures of pain, illness duration, fatigue, concentration, unrefreshing sleep and physical function.

• Structural alterations in the hippocampus may therefore contribute to the symptoms of both ME/CFS and long COVID.

Their findings in ME/CFS to date include brainstem volume changes (which correlated with measures of pain and breathing difficulty), impaired functional connectivity between specific brain regions, and raised brain neurochemical levels.

Another, earlier study also found differences in the hippocampus in people with ME/CFS. The hippocampus is a brain structure involved in memory and learning, and is comprised of different areas, or subfields, which each have specific jobs.

To study T cells in relation to ME/CFS, the researchers analysed genetic information following symptom provocation. Analysis revealed signs of exhaustion, including altered gene regulation and higher levels of exhaustion markers.

The researchers suggested that ME/CFS leaves “epigenetic scars” on T cells, making T cells more likely to enter a state of exhaustion. Nevertheless, the researchers state that although they gathered strong evidence for T cell exhaustion in ME/CFS, “it remains unknown whether this state is a driver of pathology, or a consequence of prior triggering events”.

Ultimately this research is a starting point and has generated further questions.

The research project has a significant relevance to the treatment of municipal wastewater, which generates large amounts of sewage sludge. This sludge contains almost all the phosphorus from the wastewater together with a significant part of the organic matter.

However, this in turn is contaminated by heavy metals, organic pollutants such as pathogens, dioxins, microsites, and antibiotics. At the same time, discussions are ongoing at national and EU level to ban the sludge as it is currently treated from being placed on agricultural land.

Application in agriculture and environmental areas

Biochar is a material that in turn can be used to recover nutrients such as phosphorus, which is very important for agriculture as it is a constituent of fertilizers. At the same time, biochar helps to reduce the amount of harmful pollutants that can otherwise enter the environment. Biochar has caught the eye of industry, but research into its possible applications is still in its infancy.

The study revealed that the endurance of these stem-like T cells is fuelled by a protein called ID3, expressed by a gene of the same name. These ID3+ T cells have a unique ability to self-renew and resist exhaustion, giving them the power to sustain immune responses far longer than other T cells that don't express ID3.

However, isolating a single variable – whether humidity, temperature or pressure –proves difficult because of the interplay of overlapping factors.

Responses to weather also depend on individual factors, including the extent of joint damage, overall pain sensitivity and psychological expectations. This variability makes it difficult to link a single meteorological factor to a biological response.

Still, the evidence suggests that people with joint conditions tend to be more attuned to environmental changes, particularly pressure fluctuations.

While the relationship between weather and joint pain remains an imperfect science, the collective evidence indicates that there may be some truth to the age-old belief. For those with chronic joint conditions, shifts in barometric pressure and accompanying weather changes might indeed serve as nature’s warning system – albeit one that’s far from foolproof.

In the 1960s, researchers from France set off 17 nuclear bombs in the Algerian Sahara to test both the technology behind such weapons and their destructiveness.

The site was chosen due to the emptiness of the vast desert region. Unfortunately, the remoteness of the location was not enough to prevent thousands of Algerians from radiation fallout exposure.

More recently, in 2022, a dust storm developed over the same part of the Saharan desert and carried the dust north, making its way to parts of Europe. In this new effort, the research team wondered if radioisotopes in the dust had been carried along with it, potentially endangering people in Europe. To find out, the researchers selected 53 dust samples from multiple sites in Europe and tested them.

Testing showed that the dust had indeed arrived to the test sites from Algeria's Reggane region, where the test blasts had occurred. Testing also showed radioactive isotopes in the dust—but not at levels that would cause harm, at least according to European Union's safety rules. What was surprising, though, were the plutonium ratios, which are unique based on the fuel used to build the bomb.

The researchers found them to be below 0.07, which ruled out the radioactivity coming from a French-made bomb. Instead, the ratios, which averaged 0.187, more closely matched those that were trademarks of bombs exploded by the U.S. and U.S.S.R. back in the 1950s and 60s.

Neither the U.S. nor the U.S.S.R. conducted bomb tests in the Sahara, but both tested bombs elsewhere that were far more powerful than those tested by France in the desert. Such blasts spewed material so far into the atmosphere that it came down thousands of miles away, including in the Algerian desert.

Although organ regeneration is rare, it does happen and typically takes years to manifest because organs are complex structures. Work continues to try to understand how scientists can develop this knowledge to help with the shortage of donor organs. Thankfully, tissue regeneration happens much more often than many people might suppose, and it is a much-needed part of staying alive.

Poor air quality can significantly impact health, ecosystems, and overall quality of life. Therefore, it is essential to maintain good air quality for the well-being of humans, the environment, and economic prosperity. One hazardous gas that seriously threatens health is nitrogen dioxide (NO2). NO2 is released into the atmosphere through fuel combustion, industrial emissions, gas cooking, and other sources.

NO2 poses serious risks to human health, leading to short-term symptoms such as breathing difficulties and long-term respiratory issues with prolonged exposure. Regulatory agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the European Commission, have established exposure limits for NO2 to address these health concerns.

A new study suggests this might spread diseases over long distances as well. More than 1000 mosquitoes captured at high altitudes in Africa carried a wide variety of pathogens, researchers reported on the preprint server bioRxiv last month.

Scientists have suspected this high-altitude movement of mosquito-borne pathogens for decades.

Of all the chessmen, knights are considered the most difficult and require the most skill to carve. While pawns and other pieces can be shaped under lathes, the knights—resembling horse heads usually with wild flowing manes—are carved completely by hand. A chess carver won’t graduate from pawn to knight or any easier piece to harder ones, but instead will learn his craft from the start of his career, usually from their father or a mentor from one of the well-established chess companies.

Our data demonstrate a marked increase in Pb pollution at 2150 cal. years BP that left an imprint across terrestrial and marine settings of the Aegean region. This first manifestation of marine pollution coincides with maximum deforestation and agricultural expansion, signaling pervasive human impact on ecosystems connected to the advanced monetized societies during the Hellenistic and Roman periods in Ancient Greece.

One of the reasons it's so hard to understand and treat sepsis is that it is multifaceted. Sepsis arises when the immune system fails to control an infection and malfunctions, causing multi-organ failure. Many different infections can cause sepsis, and its symptoms and progression vary between patients and over time in the same patient. Its early symptoms are similar to those of many other illnesses, which makes it difficult to diagnose quickly and initiate timely treatment, contributing to high mortality.

Systems immunology offers a potential solution to this diagnosis problem by using mathematical and computational modeling to study the immune system in the context of all the body's other systems. It does this by using different types of clustering analysis to identify patterns in large volumes of omics data, ranging from transcriptomic data (what genes show altered expression) to proteomic and metabolomic data—data that tell us about the body's reaction to its physical circumstances, in this case sepsis, in incredibly fine-grained detail.

The team's new device is a small plastic chip whose specially designed chambers are filled with human blood stem cells and the surrounding support cells with which they interact in a hydrogel to mimic the intricate process of bone marrow development in the human embryo. This biologically inspired platform makes it possible to build living human marrow tissue that can generate functional human blood cells and release them into culture media flowing in engineered capillary blood vessels.

The bone marrow-on-a-chip allows researchers to simulate and study common side effects of medical treatments, such as radiotherapy and chemotherapy for cancer patients. When connected to another device, it can even model how the bone marrow communicates with other organs, like the lungs, to protect them from infections and other potentially life-threatening conditions.

MPA is a necrotizing vasculitis without immune deposit accumulation, and it progresses with small vessel involvement. Necrotizing arteritis, rapidly progressive pauci-immune GN, and pulmonary capillaritis or alveolar hemorrhage are common, and granulomatous inflammation is not usually present.

It is accepted that environmental factors, such as exposure to Staphylococcus aureus; the drugs hydralazine, minocycline, propylthiouracil, levamisole-adulterated cocaine, allopurinol, or rifampicin; or the toxins lead mercury and silica can trigger the emergence of ANCA-associated vasculitis

Conclusion

Considering that the use and therefore frequency of exposure to silica is increasing with industrial development, awareness should be raised of not only the pulmonary effects of silicosis but also the renal damage. Silica exposure should be avoided, especially in patients with a familial history of autoimmune diseases, as in our patient. In individuals who cannot avoid exposure, routine screenings for renal function should be conducted in addition to other systemic screenings and algorithmic evaluation that should be performed.

Conclusion

Silica and certain pesticides were significantly elevated in the urine of sugarcane workers with or without KFD. Future work should determine whether long-term occupational exposure to silica and pesticides across multiple seasons contributes to CKD in these workers.

Overall, these results confirmed that multiple exposures are occurring in sugarcane workers and may provide insight into early warning signs of kidney injury and may help explain the increased incidence of CKD among agricultural workers.

The project focused on workers without pre-existing skin abnormalities, genetic skin diseases, or a family history of skin disorders. Although it was not a criterion of selection for us, many of them claimed to have developed skin lesions gradually during their employment.

Workers who had prolonged exposure to silver and silica nanoparticles and developed skin lesions had higher genes expression of inflammatory cytokines compared with normal subjects who had no exposure to silver and silica nanoparticles. The genes expression of inflammatory cytokines continuously increased with the length of exposure, suggesting the role of chronic exposure to silver and silica nanoparticles in immune dysregulation.

Necessary measures must be considered to protect workers in nanoparticle industries against the detrimental effects of these nanoparticles. A network pharmacology study has presented suggestions for corresponding biochemical pathways for these disorders.