A battery made with urea, commonly found in fertilizers and mammal urine, could provide a low-cost way of storing energy produced through solar power or other forms of renewable energy for consumption during off hours.

The battery is nonflammable and contains electrodes made from abundant aluminum and graphite. Its electrolyte’s main ingredient, urea, is already industrially produced by the ton for plant fertilizers.

“Who would have thought you could take graphite, aluminum, urea, and actually make a battery that can cycle for a pretty long time?”

“So essentially, what you have is a battery made with some of the cheapest and most abundant materials you can find on Earth. And it actually has good performance,” says Hongjie Dai, chemistry professor at Stanford University. “Who would have thought you could take graphite, aluminum, urea, and actually make a battery that can cycle for a pretty long time?”

In 2015, Dai’s lab was the first to make a rechargeable aluminum battery. This system charged in less than a minute and lasted thousands of charge-discharge cycles. The lab collaborated with Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) to power a motorbike with this older version, that had one major drawback: it involved an expensive electrolyte.

The newest version includes a urea-based electrolyte and is about 100 times cheaper than the 2015 model, with higher efficiency and a charging time of 45 minutes. It’s the first time urea has been used in a battery. The cost difference between the two batteries, Dai says, is “like night and day.” The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Unlike energy derived from fossil fuels, solar energy can essentially be harnessed only when the sun is shining. A solar panel pumps energy into the electrical grid during daylight hours. If that energy isn’t consumed right away, it is lost as heat. As the demand for renewable technologies grows, so does the need for cheap, efficient batteries to store the energy for release at night. Today’s batteries, like lithium-ion or lead acid batteries, are costly and have limited lifespans.

Solar homes could get batteries from this glowing dye

The new battery could provide a solution to the grid’s storage problem, says doctoral candidate Michael Angell. “It’s cheap. It’s efficient. Grid storage is the main goal.”

Grid storage is also the most realistic goal, because of the battery’s low cost, high efficiency, and long cycle life, Angell says. One kind of efficiency, called Coulombic efficiency, is a measurement of how much charge exits the battery per unit of charge that it takes in during charging. The Coulombic efficiency for this battery is high—99.7 percent.

Though also efficient, lithium-ion batteries commonly found in small electronics and other devices can be flammable. By contrast, the urea battery is inflammable and therefore less risky.

“I would feel safe if my backup battery in my house is made of urea with little chance of causing fire,” Dai says.

How to store solar energy by heating up rust

To meet the demands of grid storage, a commercial battery will need to last at least ten years. By investigating the chemical processes inside the battery, Angell hopes to extend its lifetime. The outlook is promising. In the lab, these urea-based aluminum ion batteries can go through about 1,500 charge cycles with a 45-minute charging time.

“With this battery, the dream is for solar energy to be stored in every building and every home,” Dai says. “Maybe it will change everyday life. We don’t know.”

The battery’s patents have been licensed to AB Systems, founded by Dai. A commercial version is currently in development.

The US Department of Energy, the Global Networking Talent 3.0 Plan, the Ministry of Education of Taiwan, and the Taishan Scholar Project funded the work.

Source: Jackie Flynn for Stanford University

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Researchers have identified two chemicals in the urine of predatory blue crabs that warn mud crabs of an impending attack.

Beyond decoding crab-eat-crab alarm triggers, pinpointing the compounds for the first time opens new doors to understanding how chemicals invisibly regulate marine wildlife.

“You might call trigonelline and homarine fear-inducing cues.”

The findings, which appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences could someday contribute to better management of crab and oyster fisheries, and help specify which pollutants upset them.

In coastal marshes, these urinary alarm chemicals, trigonelline and homarine, help to regulate the ecological balance of who eats how many of whom—and not just crabs.

Blue crabs, which are tough, strong, and about hand-sized, eat mud crabs, which are about the size of a silver dollar and thin-shelled. Mud crabs eat a lot of oysters, but when blue crabs are going after mud crabs, the mud crabs hide and freeze, so far fewer oysters get eaten than usual.

Humans are part of the food chain, too, eating oysters as well as blue crabs that boil up a bright orange. The blue refers to the color of markings on their appendages before they’re cooked. So blue crab urinary chemicals influence seafood availability for people, too.

Duck and cover

The fact that blue crab urine scares mud crabs was already known. Mud crabs duck and cover when exposed to samples taken in the field and in the lab, even when the blue crabs aren’t visible. Digestive products, or metabolites, in blue crab urine trigger the mud crabs’ reaction, which also makes them stop foraging for food themselves.

“Mud crabs react most strongly when blue crabs have already eaten other mud crabs,” says Julia Kubanek, professor of biological sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology and co-lead author of the research.

“A change in the chemical balance in blue crab urine tells mud crabs that blue crabs just ate their cousins,” she says.

Figuring out the two specific chemicals, trigonelline and homarine, that set off the alarm system, out of myriad candidate molecules, is new and has been a challenging research achievement.

“My guess is that there are many hundreds of chemicals in the animal’s urine,” says Kubanek.

Trigonelline has been studied, albeit loosely, in some diseases, and is known as one of the ingredients in coffee beans that, upon roasting, breaks down into other compounds that give coffee its aroma. Homarine is very similar to trigonelline, and, while less studied, is also common.

“These chemicals are found in many places,” Kubanek says. But picking them out of all the chemicals in blue crab urine for the first time was like finding two needles in a haystack.

‘Walking noses’

In the past, researchers trying to narrow down such chemicals have often started out by separating them out in arduous laboratory procedures then testing them one at a time to see if any of them worked. There was a good chance of turning up nothing.

For the current study, researchers went after the whole haystack of chemicals at one time using mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

“We screened the entire chemical composition of each sample at once,” Kubanek says. “We analyzed lots and lots of samples to fish out chemical candidates.”

The researchers discovered spikes in about a dozen metabolites after blue crabs ate mud crabs. They tested out those pee chemicals that spiked on the mud crabs and discovered that trigonelline and homarine distinctly made them crouch.

“Trigonelline scares the mud crabs a little bit more,” Kubanek says.

More specifically, high concentrations of either of the two did the trick, says co-lead author Marc Weissburg, professor of biological sciences. “It’s clear that there was a dose-dependent response. Mud crabs have evolved to home in on that elevated dose.”

“Most crustaceans are walking noses,” Weissburg says. “They detect chemicals with sensors on their claws, antennae, and even the walking legs. The compounds we isolated are pretty simple, which suggests they might be easily detectable in a variety of places on a crab. This redundancy is good because it increases the likelihood that the mud crabs get the message and not get eaten.”

Affecting the entire ecosystem

Evolution preserved the mud crabs with the duck-and-cover reaction to the two chemicals, which also influenced the ecological balance, in part by pushing blue crabs to look for more of their food elsewhere. But it influenced other animal populations as well.

For prey escaping predators, location matters

“These chemicals are staggeringly important,” Weissburg says “The scent from a blue crab potentially affects a large number of mud crabs, all of which stop eating oysters, and that helps preserve the oyster populations.”

All that also affects food sources for marine birds and mammals: Just by the effects of two chemicals, and there are so many more chemical signals around. “It’s hard for us to appreciate the richness of this chemical landscape,” Weissburg says.

As scientists learn more, influencing these systems could become useful to ecologists and the fishing industry, Weissburg says.

“We might even be able to use these chemicals to control oyster consumption by predators to help preserve these habitats, which are critical, or to help oyster farmers.”

Pollutants in pesticides and herbicides are known to interfere with estuaries’ ecologies. “It will be a lot easier to test how strong this is by knowing specific ecological chemicals,” Weissburg says.

Evading predators is more complex than ‘run away!’

By the way, trigonelline and homarine are not pheromones.

“Pheromones are signaling molecules that have a function within the same species, like to attract mates,” Kubanek says. “And blue crabs and mud crabs are not the same species. In this case, the mud crabs have evolved to chemically eavesdrop on the blue crabs’ pee. You might call trigonelline and homarine fear-inducing cues.”

The National Science Foundation funded the work.

Source: Georgia Institute of Technology

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More than half of hospital patients who get a urinary catheter experienced a complication, in-depth interviews and chart reviews from more than 2,000 patients show.

“Our findings underscore the importance of avoiding an indwelling urinary catheter unless it is absolutely necessary and removing it as soon as possible.”

The new study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, puts large-scale evidence behind what many hospital patients already know: Having a urinary catheter may help empty the bladder—but it can also be painful, lead to urinary tract infections, and cause other issues in the hospital and beyond.

Although many patient safety experts have focused on UTIs that can arise from indwelling urinary catheters, also called Foley catheters, that risk is five times less common than noninfectious problems, the study found.

Those issues include pain, bloody urine, and activity restrictions while the catheter was still in; trouble with urinating and sexual function can occur after the device was removed.

“Our findings underscore the importance of avoiding an indwelling urinary catheter unless it is absolutely necessary and removing it as soon as possible,” says Sanjay Saint, lead author of the new study and chief of medicine at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System, professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan, and director of the University of Michigan/VA Patient Safety Enhancement Program.

For the new study, Saint and colleagues in Michigan and two Texas hospitals analyzed data from 2,076 patients who had recently had a catheter for short-term use. Most of them received the catheter because they were having surgery.

The team went back to each patient twice—two weeks and one month after their catheter placement, respectively—and asked about their catheter-related experiences.

Because two of the hospitals in the study are Veterans Affairs hospitals, nearly three-quarters of the patients were male. The catheter came out within three days of insertion for 76 percent of the patients.

In all, 57 percent of the patients said they’d experienced at least one complication.

Key findings include:

• Just over 10 percent of patients reported infections. Those include both formal diagnoses and symptoms consistent with one that required a doctor’s attention.
• 55 percent of patients reported at least one noninfectious complication.
• Not many patients said the catheter hurt going in, although most were having an operation and were not awake when the catheter went in. But 31 percent of those whose catheter had already come out at the time of the first interview said it hurt or caused bleeding during removal. More than half of those who participated in interviews while they still had a catheter in said it was causing them pain or discomfort.
• One in 4 patients said the catheter had caused them to experience bladder spasms or a sense of urgency about urinating; 10 percent said it had led to blood in their urine.
• Among those who did the interviews while a catheter was still in place, nearly 40 percent said it restricted their daily activities, and 44 percent said it restricted their social activities.
• Among those who had already had their catheter removed, about 20 percent said they had experienced urine leakage or difficulty starting or stopping urination. Nearly 5 percent said it had led to sexual problems.

Saint, a longtime champion of efforts to measure and prevent catheter-associated infections, plans to conduct further research on the topic.

Simple alerts can cut infections from catheters

“While there has been appropriate attention paid to the infectious harms of indwelling urethral catheters over the past several decades, recently we have better appreciated the extent of noninfectious harms that are caused by these devices,” he says.

Coauthors are from Baylor College of Medicine.

Source: University of Michigan

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The acidity of urine—as well as the presence of small molecules related to diet—may influence how well bacteria can grow in the urinary tract, a new study shows.

The research may have implications for treating urinary tract infections, which are among the most common bacterial infections worldwide.

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) often are caused by a strain of bacteria called Escherichia coli (E. coli), and doctors long have relied on antibiotics to kill the microbes. But increasing bacterial resistance to these drugs is leading researchers to look for alternative treatment strategies.

“Many physicians can tell you that they see patients who are particularly susceptible to urinary tract infections,” says senior author Jeffrey P. Henderson, assistant professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

“We often don’t know why certain people seem to be prone to recurrent UTIs. For a long time, we had inexpensive antibiotics that worked really well for this. But over the last 10-15 years, we have seen a huge jump in bacterial infections that are resistant to many of these drugs.”

Pee pH

With this in mind, Henderson and his team, including first author Robin R. Shields-Cutler, a graduate student in Henderson’s lab, were interested in studying how the body naturally fights bacterial infections. They cultured E. coli in urine samples from healthy volunteers and noted major differences in how well individual urine samples could harness a key immune protein to limit bacterial growth.

“We could divide these urine samples into two groups based on whether they permitted or restricted bacterial growth,” Henderson says. “Then we asked, what is special about the urine samples that restricted growth?”

The urine samples that prevented bacterial growth supported more activity of this key protein, which the body makes naturally in response to infection, than the samples that permitted bacteria to grow easily.

The protein is called siderocalin, and past research has suggested that it helps the body fight infection by depriving bacteria of iron, a mineral necessary for bacterial growth. Their data led the researchers to ask if any characteristics of their healthy volunteers were associated with the effectiveness of siderocalin.

“Age and sex did not turn out to be major players,” Shields-Cutler says. “Of all the factors we measured, the only one that was really different between the two groups was pH—how acidic or basic the urine was.”

‘An incredibly complex medium’

Henderson says that conventional wisdom in medicine favors the idea that acidic urine is better for restricting bacterial growth. But their results were surprising because samples that were less acidic, closer to the neutral pH of pure water, showed higher activity of the protein siderocalin and were better at restricting bacterial growth than the more acidic samples.

Importantly, the researchers also showed that they could encourage or discourage bacterial growth in urine simply by adjusting the pH, a finding that could have implications for how patients with UTIs are treated.

“Physicians are very good at manipulating urinary pH,” says Henderson, who treats patients with UTIs. “If you take Tums, for example, it makes the urine less acidic. But pH is not the whole story here. Urine is a destination for much of the body’s waste in the form of small molecules. It’s an incredibly complex medium that is changed by diet, individual genetics, and many other factors.”

After analyzing thousands of compounds in the samples, the researchers determined that the presence of small metabolites called aromatics, which vary depending on a person’s diet, also contributed to variations in bacterial growth. Samples that restricted bacterial growth had more aromatic compounds, and urine that permitted bacterial growth had fewer.

Iron binders

Henderson and his colleagues suspect that at least some of these aromatics are good iron binders, helping deprive the bacteria of iron. And perhaps surprisingly, these molecules are not produced by human cells, but by a person’s gut microbes as they process food in the diet.

“Our study suggests that the body’s immune system harnesses dietary plant compounds to prevent bacterial growth,” Henderson says. “We identified a list of compounds of interest, and many of these are associated with specific dietary components and with gut microbes.”

Indeed, their results implicate cranberries among other possible dietary interventions. Shield-Cutler note that many studies already have investigated extracts or juices from cranberries as UTI treatments but the results of such investigations have not been consistent.

“Its possible that cranberries may be more effective when paired with a treatment to make the urine less acidic,” Henderson says. “And even then, maybe cranberries only work in people who have the right gut microbes.”

[related]

The investigators also studied the bacteria’s strategies for resisting the body’s innate immunity. E.coli make a compound called enterobactin that binds strongly to iron, stealing it from the host. The new study showed that enterobactin is particularly good at binding iron in urine. So finding ways to block it may open up new opportunities for developing antimicrobial drugs that work very differently from traditional antibiotics.

The researchers say there are many future directions for this research, including working out more of the details governing whether the body or the bacteria will win the battle over iron, and exploring the specifics of the gut microbiomes of their healthy volunteers.

The study appears in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), including the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases; the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences; the Longer Life Foundation; United States Public Health Service; a Career Award for Medical Scientists from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund; a Monsanto Excellence Fund Graduate Fellowship; and the Barnes-Jewish Hospital Patient Safety & Quality Fellowship Program supported the work.

Source: Washington University in St. Louis

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About one in five wounded soldiers suffers from traumatic brain injury, and an estimated 52 percent of those injuries are blast-induced neurotrauma.

Some of those brain injuries are difficult to diagnose because people don’t always display obvious motor impairment or other neurological symptoms.

“Many times they don’t even realize they’ve been injured, and this is particularly alarming because these injuries have been linked to severe long-term psychiatric and degenerative neurological dysfunction,” says Riyi Shi, a professor in the basic medical sciences department and school of biomedical engineering at Purdue University.

“The underlying mechanisms of injury remain poorly understood, impeding development of diagnostic and treatment strategies.”

[IED blasts leave scars on brain]

The initial injury is caused by the shock wave from explosions. However, secondary damage can take place in the days and weeks that follow the initial injury—and this secondary damage might be treatable.

Scientists have developed a new strategy to establish a clinically relevant “animal model” that recreates typical human symptom profiles. The model can be used to study the effects and pinpoint mechanisms responsible for ongoing damage that occurs following the initial injury, Shi says.

The findings, published in the Journal of Neurosurgery, suggest that a simple urine test could be used to diagnose the injury—and damaging effects might be alleviated through drug therapy that reduces the concentration of a toxic compound produced by traumatized cells.

Long-term consequences

“Early detection and intervention could potentially mitigate or prevent delayed onset development of significant neurological dysfunction,” Shi says.

The research shows evidence of brain inflammation that may indicate ongoing damage, potentially leading to altered brain function and degenerative diseases.

“We detected structural and biochemical brain damage without obvious motor or cognitive deficits,” Shi says. “These findings highlight the difficulty and importance of early detection, indicating missed early diagnosis and subsequent lack of intervention could lead to serious long-term consequences.”

[Military sensors capture blast data]

A neurotoxin called acrolein is produced within the body after nerve cells are damaged and has been shown to lead to continued damage.  However, the concentration of acrolein could be reduced using the drug hydralazine, which has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for hypertension.

The drug was shown to be effective in reducing acrolein levels in previous research led by Shi, who is working to develop a low-dose version for that purpose in humans.

New findings indicate elevated levels of acrolein in brain tissue and in urine from research animals lacking neurological signs of damage. Acrolein concentrations were three times the normal level the first day of the experiment and remained elevated five days later.

Urine tests showing elevated acrolein might indicate trauma despite the lack of symptoms following mild blast injury. Treatment at this point could reduce the risk of developing chronic neurological diseases, Shi says.

The Indiana State Department of Health, National Institutes of Health, and an Indiana CTSI Collaboration in Biomedical Translational Research Pilot Program Grant provided support for the research.

Source: Purdue University

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Two chemical scents in the urine of female mice drive males wild. When scientists removed the chemicals from the pee, males lost interest in mating.

“Science has long recognized that urine, sweat, and other bodily fluids contain chemical communication signals called pheromones that can influence the biology or behavior of others,” says senior author Timothy E. Holy, associate professor of neurobiology and anatomy at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Most mammals use the information in these signals for social purposes, such as establishing territory or dominance, or in courtship and mating. In many cases, though, the specific chemical identities of the signals are unknown.”

The new study, published in the journal Cell, took advantage of the neurons in the noses of male mice to start narrowing down the compounds of interest. Using a new technique developed to identify pheromones in complex mixtures, researchers narrowed down a list of 1,600 potentially relevant chemicals in male and female mouse urine to a list of just 23. Among those 23 chemicals might be signals that convey information about sex, age, dominance, and other factors.

[Does dad’s ‘cologne’ make baby mice smarter?]

Researchers then focused on neurons that fired in response to all samples of female urine but no samples of male urine, hoping that these neurons would lead them to female sex pheromones. Only two of the 23 chemicals fit the pattern. Through collaboration with Michael L. Gross, professor of chemistry, the scientists discovered that both chemicals are waste products of steroid metabolism.

“Mice make hormones and steroids that regulate aspects of their physiology,” Holy says. “At some point, those hormones have to be cleared out and converted into waste products. So when an animal’s nose detects the waste products from another animal, it’s a bit like spying on the neighbors by going through their garbage. These chemicals send signals about what’s going on internally in another animal.”

The firing patterns of the male olfactory neurons in different strains of mice when exposed to various female urine samples implicated the two specific chemicals, providing the first evidence that they have a role in social communication by activating neurons in the nose.

“Male mice will spend a lot of time investigating female urine,” Holy says. “But they show very little interest in male urine—one sniff and they move on—and similarly little interest in the urine of female mice after their ovaries have been removed. So presumably there is some cue in normal female urine that attracts male interest.”

But beyond simply measuring the activity of neurons, the researchers analyzed male mouse behavior when exposed to the two chemicals.

[Bumblebee pheromones aren’t so simple after all]

“These two compounds alone are very good at mimicking the increased interest that males show to female mouse urine,” Holy says. “If you take one or both of these compounds and add them to male mouse urine—a stimulus male mice normally spend little time with—all of a sudden they become much more interested. It doesn’t explain the whole effect of female urine on male mice, but it explains a large fraction of the response. We think there’s still some component of the response to female urine that we’re not mimicking yet.”

Similarly, applying these chemicals to the bodies of female mice without ovaries substantially increased the number of times males attempted to mate with them. And conversely, the researchers showed that removing these two chemicals from female mouse urine substantially reduced male mating behavior.

The study is an important piece of the puzzle in understanding the neurobiology of mammals, Holy says.

“One of the nice things about this pheromone system is that it’s a relatively simple and compact neural circuit in a complicated animal. It doesn’t occupy a large percentage of the mouse’s brain and yet it does interesting things like sex recognition, decision making and learning. It’s great that we now have a new set of tools to manipulate neurons and see how they respond and what the downstream consequences are.”

The National Institutes of Health supported the work.

Source: Washington University in St. Louis

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Bearcats, also known as binturongs, smell just like buttered popcorn. For many zookeepers, the smell wafting from the binturong enclosure is so striking that they name their resident binturongs after the popular snack.

Solitary animals that rarely come face to face, binturongs use their roasty, popcorn-like aroma as a calling card to say “this is my turf” and find potential mates.

Previous studies searched for compounds in secretions from the scent glands under the binturong’s tail that could explain its signature scent, but nothing turned up.

[Male mice can’t resist 2 chemicals in female pee]

For a new paper, researchers analyzed urine samples collected during routine physical examinations of 33 binturongs at Carolina Tiger Rescue, a nonprofit wildlife sanctuary in Pittsboro, North Carolina.

Binturongs pee in a squatting position, soaking their feet and bushy tails in the process. They also drag their tails as they move about in the trees, leaving a scent trail on the branches and leaves behind them.

Using a technique called gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, the researchers identified 29 chemical compounds in the animals’ urine. The one compound that emanated from every sample was 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, or 2-AP—the same compound that gives popcorn its tantalizing scent.

What’s more, 2-AP was among the few compounds that lingered and became more dominant over time, a fact the researchers discovered when a rush airmail shipment of frozen binturong urine was delayed on a hot tarmac en route to coauthor Thomas Goodwin of Hendrix College in Arkansas for analysis.

How do they do it?

Males secrete more 2-AP than females. “The fact that the compound was in every binturong we studied, and at relatively high concentrations, means it could be a signal that says, ‘A binturong was here,’ and whether it was male or female,” says Lydia Greene, a graduate student at Duke University and first author of the study that is published in the journal the Science of Nature.

The compound 2-AP normally forms in popcorn during the popping process, when heat kicks off reactions between sugars and amino acids in the corn kernels. The cooking produces a variety of new odor and flavor molecules in a chemical reaction called the Maillard reaction. The same compound is also responsible for the comforting aromas of toasted bread and cooked rice.

“If you were to make this compound, you would have to use temperatures above what most animals can achieve physiologically,” says Christine Drea, professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke who led the study. “How does this animal make a cooking smell, but without cooking?”

[Smell can sweeten birds’ chances of mating]

It could be that binturong urine smells funny because of something they eat. The team searched for 2-AP in the binturongs’ kibble, the one cooked item in their diet, but they didn’t detect any.

A more likely explanation, is that 2-AP is produced when binturong urine comes in contact with bacteria and other microorganisms that live on the animal’s skin or fur or in its gut.

Bacteria make smelly compounds as they break down sweat in our armpits in much the same way, Drea says.

The time-release action of the microbes could help the binturongs’ urine smell-o-grams last long after the animals move on, an essential mode of communication for solitary animals that rarely encounter each other.

Tim Wallen of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Anneke Moresco of the Cincinnati Zoo are coauthors of the study. Duke, Hendrix College, and the National Science Foundation funded the work.

Source: Duke University

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An experimental system could ease the burden urine tests put on clinics and primary care doctors. A smartphone camera on top of an easily assembled box captures video and accurately analyzes color changes in a standard paper dipstick.

The simple, color-changing paper tests can measure levels of glucose, blood, protein, and other chemicals, which in turn can indicate evidence of kidney disease, diabetes, urinary tract infections, and even signs of bladder cancer.

The simple test is powerful, but it isn’t perfect: It takes time, costs money, and often gives inconclusive results that require both patient and doctor to book another appointment. Patients with long-term conditions like chronic urinary tract infections must wait for results to confirm what both patient and doctor already know before getting antibiotics. Tracking patients’ progress with multiple urine tests a day is out of the question.

In the past, innovators have created a low-cost way to analyze the urinary dipstick in any setting, even at home.

Although the test seems simple, do-it-yourself systems can be error prone, says Audrey (Ellerbee) Bowden, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University.

“You think it’s easy—you just dip the stick in urine and look for the color change, but there are things that can go wrong,” she says. “Doctors don’t end up trusting those results as accurate.”

[Urine acidity may affect odds of UTI]

Writing in Lab on a Chip, Bowden and Gennifer Smith, a PhD student in electrical engineering, detail their new low-cost, portable device that would allow patients to get consistently accurate urine test results at home, easing the workload on primary care physicians.

Other do-it-yourself systems are emerging, but the Stanford engineers think their approach is inexpensive and reliable, in part because they base their system on the same tried and trusted dipstick used in medical offices.

Fool-proofing three ways

Invented to test blood sugar in 1956, the standard dipstick test is now a paper strip with 10 square pads. Dipped in a sample, each pad changes color to screen for the presence of a different disease-indicating chemical. After waiting the appropriate amount of time, a medical professional—or, increasingly, an automated system—compares the pad shades to a color reference chart for results.

Considering the dipstick as a given, Bowden and Smith designed a system to overcome three main potential errors in a home test: lighting, volume control, and timing.

As a color-based test, the dipstick needs consistent lighting conditions. The same color can look different depending on its background, so Smith and Bowden created a black box that covers the dipstick. Its flat, interlocking parts make it easy to mail, store, and assemble.

They also tackled volume control. “If you have too little or too much urine on the dipstick, you’ll get erroneous results,” Smith says.

[Urine test might detect brain injury from blasts]

To fix this, the engineers designed a multi-layered system to load urine onto the dipstick. A dropper squeezes urine into a hole in the first layer, filling up a channel in the second layer and ten square holes in the third layer. When the third layer is inserted into the black box, some clever engineering ensures that a uniform volume of urine is deposited on each of the ten pads on the dipstick at just the right time.

Finally, a smartphone is placed on top of the black box with the video camera focused on the dipstick inside the box. Custom software reads video from the smartphone and controls the timing and color analysis.

To perform the test a person would load the urine and then push the third layer into the box. When the third layer hits the back of the box, it signals the phone to begin the video recording at the precise moment when the urine is deposited on the pads.

Timing is critical to the analysis. Pads have readout times ranging from 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Once the two minutes are up, the person can transfer the recording to a software program on their computer. For each pad, it pulls out the frames from the correct time and reads out the results.

An app for that

In the future, the engineers would like to design an app that would do the analysis on the phone and then send results directly to the doctor.

Meanwhile, they are working with the Stanford Office of Technology Licensing to see whether and how the idea might be commercialized, either as a home test in developed nations or as a baseline medical instrument in areas that don’t have easy access to well-stocked clinics.

“It’s such a hassle to go into the doctor’s office for such a simple test,” says Smith. “This device can remove the burden in developed countries and in facilities where they don’t have the resources to do these tests.”

Funding for this research came from the National Institutes of Health, the Rose Hills Foundation Graduate Engineering Fellowship, the Electrical Engineering Department New Projects Graduate Fellowship, the Oswald G. Villard Jr. Engineering Fellowship, the Stanford Graduate Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Source: Shara Tonn for Stanford University

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In coral reefs where fishing occurs, nearly half of key nutrients are missing from the ecosystem. Why? Fewer large-bodied and predator fish are around to pee in the water.

When fish urinate, they release phosphorus into the water. This phosphorus, along with nitrogen excreted as ammonium through the gills of fish, is crucial to the survival and growth of coral reefs.

“If biomass is shrinking, there are fewer fish to pee.”

“Part of the reason coral reefs work is because animals play a big role in moving nutrients around,” says Jacob Allgeier, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, and lead author of the study in Nature Communications.

“Fish hold a large proportion, if not most of the nutrients in a coral reef in their tissue, and they’re also in charge of recycling them. If you take the big fish out, you’re removing all of those nutrients from the ecosystem.”

50 percent fewer nutrients

Coauthors Abel Valdivia at the Center for Biological Diversity in San Francisco and Courtney Cox at Smithsonian Marine Station at Fort Pierce, Florida, surveyed 143 fish species at 110 sites across 43 Caribbean coral reefs that varied in the amount of fishing pressure sustained—ranging from marine preserves that banned all fishing to heavily fished reefs where large predator fish are almost gone.

Tiny creatures ‘pee’ enough to shift ocean chemistry

The researchers found that reefs with more large, predator fish had healthy levels of nutrients, while reefs depleted of large fish had nearly 50 percent fewer nutrients, including phosphorous and nitrogen, essential to their survival.

“This study is useful to understand alternative ways fishing is affecting coral reef ecosystems,” Allgeier says.

Missing fish biomass

The researchers determined that, despite the substantial reduction in fish-mediated nutrients, fishing didn’t substantially reduce the number of fish species present. Instead, the large reductions in fish pee were driven by the reduction of large-bodied fish and predator fish such as grouper, snapper, or barracuda that occurs through selective fishing practices.

“Simply stated, fish biomass in coral reefs is being reduced by fishing pressure. If biomass is shrinking, there are fewer fish to pee,” Allgeier says.

Phosphorus in fish pee and nitrogen excreted through their gills are important nutrients for coral reefs to grow. In many reef communities, fish will take shelter in and around coral during the day—peeing out valuable nutrients—then forage for prey in and around the reef by night.

Big or small, animals take about 20 seconds to pee

A Science paper in the 1980s showed that coral reefs where fish were present grew at more than double the speed of reefs where fish were absent. It was that study, undertaken by now emeritus research professor Judith Meyer at the University of Georgia, that inspired Allgeier to figure out why fish help coral reefs grow.

Coral reefs are the very definition of a delicate ecosystem. They are highly productive in terms of the biodiversity they support, but there aren’t a lot of nutrients to spare. Reefs operate on what scientists call a “tight” nutrient cycle, meaning there must be an efficient transfer of nutrients for coral to grow. This cycle is largely controlled by fish, which hold nutrients in their tissue and then excrete them through their gills and urine.

Allgeier spent four years measuring the amount of nutrients in fish pee and fish tissue to eventually build a massive dataset that tracks fish size and nutrient output and the amount they store in their tissue.

As a graduate student, Allgeier’s kitchen on Abaco Island in the Bahamas became his lab, and he caught hundreds of live fish, put them in plastic bags for half an hour, then measured the nutrients in the water before and after. He found that nitrogen output varied consistently with body size among all fish, and that carnivorous fish would pee more phosphorus than smaller herbivores.

Now, with these data serving as the basis for their models, Allgeier and collaborators can estimate the total amount of nutrient output from fish by knowing the species and body size of fish in a coral reef community.

“It’s remarkable how robust the models are just from knowing fish size and species,” he adds.

Coral reefs continue to decline in the Caribbean and worldwide, but curbing fishing practices that target large predator fish could help reefs recover, Allgeier says.

The researchers expect this relationship between fish and coral exists in other reefs around the world. Allgeier is currently working with researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to collect data next on fish pee in tropical Pacific Ocean reefs.

Craig Layman of North Carolina State University is the paper’s other coauthor. The Environmental Protection Agency and the National Science Foundation supported the work.

Source: University of Washington

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When women suffer from bladder incontinence, the urge to urinate can come on suddenly and sometimes uncontrollably, leading to leaks.

Patients looking for relief can initially opt for first- and second-line therapies such as drinking fewer liquids or caffeinated beverages, pelvic floor muscle training, and medication.

If those treatments don’t offer relief, more invasive options are available, including nerve stimulation called sacral neuromodulation (an implanted device sold as InterStim), or a bladder injection of botulinum toxin, sold as Botox.

Researchers conducted a head-to-head comparison of the two and discovered that Botox provides more daily relief for women—but also might be associated with more adverse events.

An injection of botulinum toxin in the bladder muscle works to address urgency urinary incontinence by relaxing the overactive bladder muscles that cause the condition. A sacral neuromodulation implant does the same thing by sending electrical pulses to nerves in the spine.

Demand for female urologists outpaces supply

“Urgency urinary incontinence is common, with 17 percent of women over age 45 and 25 percent of women over age 75 suffering from it,” says Cindy L. Amundsen, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Duke University School of Medicine. “That’s why it’s important for both patients and health care providers to have information that can guide their choice between these two therapies.”

Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the study involved 381 women from nine US medical centers who recorded at least six urgency incontinent episodes over three consecutive days and had not improved with other treatments.

Participants were randomly assigned to either receive sacral neuromodulation or a 200-unit injection of botulinum toxin. After a trial period to test their responsiveness to the therapies, 364 women were enrolled and followed for six months after treatment.

Researchers analyzed the number of urgency incontinent episodes on monthly “bladder diaries.” Participants who received botulinum toxin saw their number of daily urgency incontinent episodes decrease by 3.9 on average versus 3.3 on average in the sacral neuromodulation group. The difference was statistically significant.

Toxin in Botox can travel through nerves

Botulinum toxin participants also reported a greater reduction in bothersome symptoms, higher satisfaction with treatment, and a greater likelihood of endorsing the treatment.

Additionally, among participants who completed at least four monthly diaries, a higher percentage of botulinum toxin participants saw at least a 75-percent reduction in or complete resolution of urgency incontinent symptoms. However, the Botox patients also had three times the rate of urinary tract infections. Some botulinum toxin participants also required intermittent self-catheterization, although at lower rates than reported in previous studies using this dose.

The most common adverse event for the sacral neuromodulation participants was removal or revision of the implant during the six months. This occurred at a low rate, similar to previous studies.

“This study is valuable because it is the first randomized trial comparing the efficacy of two FDA-approved, third-line therapies in a severely affected population,” Amundsen says. “The information should help guide care.”

While the study didn’t compare the cost of the two treatments, patients who receive botulinum toxin may require additional injections as part of continued treatment. Additionally, the study only takes Botox into account and no conclusions can be drawn for other botulinum toxin preparations that may be used to treat urgency incontinence.

The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institutes of Health Office of Research on Women’s Health funded the work. One coauthor reported financial relationships with the commercial makers of both InterStim and Botox. Full disclosures are available in the study’s manuscript.

Source: Duke University

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A battery made with urea, commonly found in fertilizers and mammal urine, could provide a low-cost way of storing energy produced through solar power or other forms of renewable energy for consumption during off hours.

The battery is nonflammable and contains electrodes made from abundant aluminum and graphite. Its electrolyte’s main ingredient, urea, is already industrially produced by the ton for plant fertilizers.

“Who would have thought you could take graphite, aluminum, urea, and actually make a battery that can cycle for a pretty long time?”

“So essentially, what you have is a battery made with some of the cheapest and most abundant materials you can find on Earth. And it actually has good performance,” says Hongjie Dai, chemistry professor at Stanford University. “Who would have thought you could take graphite, aluminum, urea, and actually make a battery that can cycle for a pretty long time?”

In 2015, Dai’s lab was the first to make a rechargeable aluminum battery. This system charged in less than a minute and lasted thousands of charge-discharge cycles. The lab collaborated with Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) to power a motorbike with this older version, that had one major drawback: it involved an expensive electrolyte.

The newest version includes a urea-based electrolyte and is about 100 times cheaper than the 2015 model, with higher efficiency and a charging time of 45 minutes. It’s the first time urea has been used in a battery. The cost difference between the two batteries, Dai says, is “like night and day.” The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Unlike energy derived from fossil fuels, solar energy can essentially be harnessed only when the sun is shining. A solar panel pumps energy into the electrical grid during daylight hours. If that energy isn’t consumed right away, it is lost as heat. As the demand for renewable technologies grows, so does the need for cheap, efficient batteries to store the energy for release at night. Today’s batteries, like lithium-ion or lead acid batteries, are costly and have limited lifespans.

Solar homes could get batteries from this glowing dye

The new battery could provide a solution to the grid’s storage problem, says doctoral candidate Michael Angell. “It’s cheap. It’s efficient. Grid storage is the main goal.”

Grid storage is also the most realistic goal, because of the battery’s low cost, high efficiency, and long cycle life, Angell says. One kind of efficiency, called Coulombic efficiency, is a measurement of how much charge exits the battery per unit of charge that it takes in during charging. The Coulombic efficiency for this battery is high—99.7 percent.

Though also efficient, lithium-ion batteries commonly found in small electronics and other devices can be flammable. By contrast, the urea battery is inflammable and therefore less risky.

“I would feel safe if my backup battery in my house is made of urea with little chance of causing fire,” Dai says.

How to store solar energy by heating up rust

To meet the demands of grid storage, a commercial battery will need to last at least ten years. By investigating the chemical processes inside the battery, Angell hopes to extend its lifetime. The outlook is promising. In the lab, these urea-based aluminum ion batteries can go through about 1,500 charge cycles with a 45-minute charging time.

“With this battery, the dream is for solar energy to be stored in every building and every home,” Dai says. “Maybe it will change everyday life. We don’t know.”

The battery’s patents have been licensed to AB Systems, founded by Dai. A commercial version is currently in development.

The US Department of Energy, the Global Networking Talent 3.0 Plan, the Ministry of Education of Taiwan, and the Taishan Scholar Project funded the work.

Source: Jackie Flynn for Stanford University

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Researchers have identified two chemicals in the urine of predatory blue crabs that warn mud crabs of an impending attack.

Beyond decoding crab-eat-crab alarm triggers, pinpointing the compounds for the first time opens new doors to understanding how chemicals invisibly regulate marine wildlife.

“You might call trigonelline and homarine fear-inducing cues.”

The findings, which appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences could someday contribute to better management of crab and oyster fisheries, and help specify which pollutants upset them.

In coastal marshes, these urinary alarm chemicals, trigonelline and homarine, help to regulate the ecological balance of who eats how many of whom—and not just crabs.

Blue crabs, which are tough, strong, and about hand-sized, eat mud crabs, which are about the size of a silver dollar and thin-shelled. Mud crabs eat a lot of oysters, but when blue crabs are going after mud crabs, the mud crabs hide and freeze, so far fewer oysters get eaten than usual.

Humans are part of the food chain, too, eating oysters as well as blue crabs that boil up a bright orange. The blue refers to the color of markings on their appendages before they’re cooked. So blue crab urinary chemicals influence seafood availability for people, too.

Duck and cover

The fact that blue crab urine scares mud crabs was already known. Mud crabs duck and cover when exposed to samples taken in the field and in the lab, even when the blue crabs aren’t visible. Digestive products, or metabolites, in blue crab urine trigger the mud crabs’ reaction, which also makes them stop foraging for food themselves.

“Mud crabs react most strongly when blue crabs have already eaten other mud crabs,” says Julia Kubanek, professor of biological sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology and co-lead author of the research.

“A change in the chemical balance in blue crab urine tells mud crabs that blue crabs just ate their cousins,” she says.

Figuring out the two specific chemicals, trigonelline and homarine, that set off the alarm system, out of myriad candidate molecules, is new and has been a challenging research achievement.

“My guess is that there are many hundreds of chemicals in the animal’s urine,” says Kubanek.

Trigonelline has been studied, albeit loosely, in some diseases, and is known as one of the ingredients in coffee beans that, upon roasting, breaks down into other compounds that give coffee its aroma. Homarine is very similar to trigonelline, and, while less studied, is also common.

“These chemicals are found in many places,” Kubanek says. But picking them out of all the chemicals in blue crab urine for the first time was like finding two needles in a haystack.

‘Walking noses’

In the past, researchers trying to narrow down such chemicals have often started out by separating them out in arduous laboratory procedures then testing them one at a time to see if any of them worked. There was a good chance of turning up nothing.

For the current study, researchers went after the whole haystack of chemicals at one time using mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

“We screened the entire chemical composition of each sample at once,” Kubanek says. “We analyzed lots and lots of samples to fish out chemical candidates.”

The researchers discovered spikes in about a dozen metabolites after blue crabs ate mud crabs. They tested out those pee chemicals that spiked on the mud crabs and discovered that trigonelline and homarine distinctly made them crouch.

“Trigonelline scares the mud crabs a little bit more,” Kubanek says.

More specifically, high concentrations of either of the two did the trick, says co-lead author Marc Weissburg, professor of biological sciences. “It’s clear that there was a dose-dependent response. Mud crabs have evolved to home in on that elevated dose.”

“Most crustaceans are walking noses,” Weissburg says. “They detect chemicals with sensors on their claws, antennae, and even the walking legs. The compounds we isolated are pretty simple, which suggests they might be easily detectable in a variety of places on a crab. This redundancy is good because it increases the likelihood that the mud crabs get the message and not get eaten.”

Affecting the entire ecosystem

Evolution preserved the mud crabs with the duck-and-cover reaction to the two chemicals, which also influenced the ecological balance, in part by pushing blue crabs to look for more of their food elsewhere. But it influenced other animal populations as well.

For prey escaping predators, location matters

“These chemicals are staggeringly important,” Weissburg says “The scent from a blue crab potentially affects a large number of mud crabs, all of which stop eating oysters, and that helps preserve the oyster populations.”

All that also affects food sources for marine birds and mammals: Just by the effects of two chemicals, and there are so many more chemical signals around. “It’s hard for us to appreciate the richness of this chemical landscape,” Weissburg says.

As scientists learn more, influencing these systems could become useful to ecologists and the fishing industry, Weissburg says.

“We might even be able to use these chemicals to control oyster consumption by predators to help preserve these habitats, which are critical, or to help oyster farmers.”

Pollutants in pesticides and herbicides are known to interfere with estuaries’ ecologies. “It will be a lot easier to test how strong this is by knowing specific ecological chemicals,” Weissburg says.

Evading predators is more complex than ‘run away!’

By the way, trigonelline and homarine are not pheromones.

“Pheromones are signaling molecules that have a function within the same species, like to attract mates,” Kubanek says. “And blue crabs and mud crabs are not the same species. In this case, the mud crabs have evolved to chemically eavesdrop on the blue crabs’ pee. You might call trigonelline and homarine fear-inducing cues.”

The National Science Foundation funded the work.

Source: Georgia Institute of Technology

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A soft, implantable device can detect over-activity in the bladder and then use light from tiny, biointegrated LEDs to tamp down the urge to urinate.

The device works in laboratory rats and could one day help people who suffer incontinence bypass the need for medication or electronic stimulators, researchers say.

Overactive bladder, pain, burning, and a frequent need to urinate are common and distressing problems. For about 30 years, stimulators that send an electric current to the nerve that controls the bladder were the treatment for patients with severe bladder problems. Such implants improve incontinence and overactive bladder, but they also can disrupt normal nerve signaling to other organs.

“There definitely is benefit to that sort of nerve stimulation,” says Robert W. Gereau IV, professor of anesthesiology at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine. “But there also are some off-target side effects that result from a lack of specificity with those older devices.” Researchers developed the device in hopes of preventing these kinds of side effects.

Bluetooth communication

During a minor surgical procedure, the team implanted a soft, stretchy, belt-like device around the bladder. As the bladder fills and empties, the belt expands and contracts. The researchers also injected proteins called opsins into the animals’ bladders.

A virus that binds to nerve cells in the bladder carries the opsins, making them sensitive to light signals. This allowed the researchers to use optogenetics—the use of light to control cell behavior in living tissue—to activate those cells.

Using Bluetooth communication to signal an external hand-held device, the scientists can read information in real time and, using a simple algorithm, detect when the bladder is full, when the animal has emptied its bladder, and when the bladder is emptying too frequently.

“When the bladder is emptying too often, the external device sends a signal that activates micro-LEDs on the bladder band device, and the lights then shine on sensory neurons in the bladder,” Gereau says. “This reduces the activity of the sensory neurons and restores normal bladder function.”

As needed basis

The researchers believe a similar strategy could work in people. Devices for people likely would be larger than the ones used in rats. Researchers could implant them without surgery, using catheters to place them through the urethra into the bladder.

“We’re excited about these results,” says John A. Rogers, professor of materials science and engineering, biomedical engineering, and neurological surgery at Northwestern University.

“This example brings together the key elements of an autonomous, implantable system that can operate in synchrony with the body to improve health: a precision biophysical sensor of organ activity; a noninvasive means to modulate that activity; a soft, battery-free module for wireless communication and control; and data analytics algorithms for closed-loop operation.”

Closed-loop operation essentially means the device delivers the therapy only when it detects a problem. When the behavior is normalized, the micro-LEDs are turned off, and therapy can stop.

The researchers expect to test similar devices in larger animals and believe the strategy could treat other parts of the body—for chronic pain for example, or using light to stimulate cells in the pancreas to secrete insulin. One hurdle, however, involves the viruses used to get light-sensitive proteins to bind to cells in organs.

“We don’t yet know whether we can achieve stable expression of the opsins using the viral approach and, more importantly, whether this will be safe over the long term,” Gereau says. “That issue needs to be tested in preclinical models and early clinical trials to make sure the strategy is completely safe.”

Additional researchers are from Washington University in St. Louis, Northwestern, and the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. The National Institutes of Health and the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer’s Network funded the work.

Source: Washington University in St. Louis

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Ancient pee suggests humans made a big leap in their domestication of animals starting about 10,450 years ago.

At the beginning of that time period, people hunted game to obtain meat, says study coauthor Mary Stiner. By about 1,000 years later, community members were managing herds of sheep and goats for food, the team found.

Anthropologists consider the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and herding to be a crucial turning point in the history of humanity.

“We have been working very hard to understand the evolution and origins of these domestication relationships,” says Stiner, professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona.

“This happens long before you have an animal or plant truly transformed by interactions with people,” Stiner says. “In this time period, we’re working on the problem of the entry-level context of the human-animal relationship.”

Dung and other evidence

To reconstruct the scale and pace of change during the first phases of animal domestication, lead author Jordan Abell, then an undergraduate in geosciences, figured out a way to use urine salts left by humans and animals at an ancient site in Turkey to calculate how the density of animals and humans changed over time.

“And we thought, well, humans and animals pee…”

“This is the first time, to our knowledge, that people have picked up on salts in archaeological materials and used them in a way to look at the development of animal management,” says Abell, now a graduate student at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.

Scholars think the intensive food production that started about 11,000 years ago—a time period called the Neolithic Revolution—allowed cities to grow, led to technological innovation, and eventually enabled human civilization as we know it today.

Scientists knew people at the site had captive animals because of accumulations of dung and other evidence. However, reconstructing the scale and pace at which humans were domesticating sheep and goats was difficult using just bone fragments and fossilized dung, Abell says.

The researchers wondered what other clues a bunch of animals onsite might have left behind. Coauthor Susan Mentzer of the University of Tübingen in Germany previously found chemical compounds in the soil that might be from urine.

“And we thought, well, humans and animals pee, and when they pee, they release a bunch of salt,” Abell says. “At a dry place like this, we didn’t think salts would be washed away and redistributed.”

Urine salts

The various levels of the archeological dig at Aşıklı Höyük span the time before human settlement through the time when the settlement was abandoned—a period of about 1,000 years.

As reported in Science Advances, the team collected 113 samples from all across the site–from trash piles to bricks and hearths, and from different time periods—to look at patterns in the sodium, nitrate, and chlorine salt levels. The researchers estimated how many humans and animals the ancient salt deposits represented by using information on urine salts from modern-day feedlots in which animal numbers are known.

The researchers have other archaeological evidence, such as the numbers of structures, to use to estimate the number of humans.

“By 500 years in, there were more sheep and goats than people…”

At the lowest levels of the archeological dig, the natural layers before the settlement was built, the researchers found almost no urine salts. Salt levels in the layer with the first evidence of human habitation increased slightly.

The team found a spike in urine salts as much as 1,000 times more than the pre-settlement levels from 10,000 to 9,700 years ago. That jump in salts indicates a rapid increase in the number of occupants—both human and animal. After that, the concentrations decrease slightly.

More meat

Abell says those changes line up with other evidence from the site that suggests the people initially hunted sheep and goats, then started keeping just a few animals, and shifted to having large numbers of animals corralled within the settlement. Finally, as animal numbers increased even more, the animals were moved to the periphery of the site.

Stiner says, “In the very beginning, a family might have one or two kids or lambs they raised through the winter—kind of a meat supplement. By 500 years in, there were more sheep and goats than people—and on and on, as they became more and more dependent on the animals.”

The team calculated that 10,450 years ago, the density of people and animals occupying the settlement at Aşıklı Höyük jumped from near zero to approximately one person or animal for every 10 square meters. Modern-day semi-intensive feedlots have densities of about one sheep for every 5 square meters.

The researchers hope to find a way to differentiate between human and animal urine salts. They think the methodology could be applied in other arid areas and could be especially helpful at sites where other physical evidence, such as bones, is lacking.

Stiner says the new method could help to clarify the larger picture of humanity’s relationship to animals during this transitional period. “We might find similar trends in other archaeological sites of the period in the Middle East.”

Additional coauthors are from the University of Arizona and Istanbul University in Turkey. The National Science Foundation funded the research.

Source: University of Arizona/Sarah Fecht for Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

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Recycled and aged human urine can serve as a fertilizer with low risks of spreading antibiotic-resistant DNA, according to new research.

It’s a key finding in efforts to identify more sustainable alternatives to widely used fertilizers that contribute to water pollution. Their high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus can spur the growth of algae, which can threaten our sources of drinking water.

Urine contains nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—key nutrients that plants need to grow. Today, municipal treatment systems don’t totally remove these nutrients from wastewater before releasing it into rivers and streams. At the same time, manufacturing synthetic fertilizer is expensive and energy intensive.

Over the last several years, a group of researchers has studied the removal of bacteria, viruses, and pharmaceuticals in urine to improve the safety of urine-derived fertilizers.

In this new study, they show that the practice of “aging” collected urine in sealed containers over several months effectively deactivates 99% of antibiotic-resistant genes that were present in bacteria in the urine.

“Based on our results, we think that microorganisms in the urine break down the extracellular DNA in the urine very quickly,” says Krista Wigginton, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan and corresponding author of the study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

“That means that if bacteria in the collected urine are resistant to antibiotics and the bacteria die, as they do when they are stored in urine, the released DNA won’t pose a risk of transferring resistance to bacteria in the environment when the fertilizer is applied.”

Previous research has shown that antibiotic-resistant DNA can be found in urine, raising the question of whether fertilizers derived from it might carry over that resistance.

The researchers collected urine from more than 100 men and women and stored it for 12 to 16 months. During that period, ammonia levels in the urine increase, lowering acidity levels and killing most of the bacteria that the donors shed. Bacteria from urinary tract infections often harbor antibiotic resistance.

When the ammonia kills the bacteria, they dump their DNA into the solution. It’s these extracellular snippets of DNA that the researchers studied to see how quickly they would break down.

Urine has been utilized as a crop fertilizer for thousands of years, but has been getting a closer look in recent years as a way to create a circular nutrient economy. It could enable manufacturing of fertilizers in a more environmentally friendly way, reduce the energy required to manage nutrients at wastewater treatment plants, and create localized fertilizer sources.

“There are two main reasons we think urine fertilizer is the way of the future,” Wigginton says. “Our current agricultural system is not sustainable, and the way we address nutrients in our wastewater can be much more efficient.”

In their ongoing work, the team is moving towards agricultural settings. “We are doing field experiments to assess technologies that process urine into a safe and sustainable fertilizer for food crops and other plants, like flowers. So far, our experimental results are quite promising,” says Nancy Love, professor of civil and environmental engineering.

The National Science Foundation funded the work.

Source: University of Michigan

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Highly active individuals deemed “super-urinators” are key to maintaining ecosystem health, research in Bahamian mangrove estuaries finds.

The study finds that the individual gray and cubera snappers that spent the most time swimming and foraging for food also spread the highest levels of the essential nutrient nitrogen throughout the estuary in their urine.

The excretory contributions of the most active individuals nearly doubled the total amount of nitrogen that would otherwise be present in the ecosystem. That extra fertilizer means more plant growth and more food at the base of the food web.

“In any population, the behavior of key individuals can have outsized impacts on their ecosystem—think Steve Jobs,” says marine ecologist Jacob Allgeier, assistant professor in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan. “Quantifying the behavior of key individuals in wild populations is an emerging frontier in ecology, with the potential to upend how we define biodiversity and our attempts to conserve it.”

Allgeier is the lead author of a paper in Science Advances that reports the findings of a study that radio-tracked 33 gray snappers and 25 cuberas in a mangrove-lined estuary on Abaco Island in the Bahamas in 2006 and 2007.

A larger study will radio-track about 500 Abaco Island fish to learn more about their feeding behavior.

The big-picture goal of that research is to understand how an unlikely but renewable source of fertilizer—fish excretion—can be used to stimulate fish production and improve food security for people living in tropical ecosystems.

In Science Advances, Allgeier and his colleagues report that while the most active snappers had an outsized impact on ecosystem health, they were also the most likely to be caught by anglers, who prize their bold behavior and fight.

Gray and cubera snapper support important commercial and subsistence fisheries throughout the Caribbean and are traditionally harvested by spearfishing and angling with hook and line. Spearfishing typically targets fish with large body size, while angling tends to select for bolder or more active individuals.

Active fish and nitrogen

Allgeier and his colleagues used computer models to simulate the harvest of various types of individuals and found that the selective removal of the most active snappers reduced the nitrogen supply in the ecosystem by up to 69%.

“Our results challenge the species-centric definition of biodiversity and provide evidence that the role of individuals may need to be further reconciled in how we approach conservation and the maintenance of ecosystem function,” Allgeier and his coauthors write.

For the study, the researchers surgically implanted transmitters into fish body cavities, and nine receivers were scattered throughout the study site. The researchers used acoustic telemetry data and mathematical models to estimate the amount of nitrogen individual fish supplied and the extent to which they spread the nutrient across the ecosystem.

They found that the amount of nitrogen supplied by the two snapper populations—excreted through their gills as ammonium—was roughly equivalent to all other nitrogen sources combined. And the most active fish contributed the most nitrogen.

“In the mangrove estuaries that we studied, we show that there is roughly double the amount of fertilizer in the ecosystem due to individuals that are disproportionate fertilizers,” Allgeier says. “We then show that fishing specifically selects for these extra-important individuals, which in turn has disproportionately negative effects on the ecosystem.”

Super-urinators

In the study of infectious diseases, individuals who demonstrate a high ability to infect others—think Typhoid Mary—are called super-spreaders. Before this concept emerged, it had long been assumed that all infected individuals had equal chances of transmitting an infection to others.

Similarly, in the management of fish and game populations, it was long assumed that individuals within populations are roughly equivalent and that the loss of any single individual has similar impacts on the ecosystem, Allgeier says. But the diversity among individuals within a single population is now a topic of growing research interest.

Allgeier refers to the overachieving fish in the Bahamian mangrove estuaries as “disproportionate fertilizers.” For simplicity’s sake, you can think of them as super-urinators.

Over the past decade, Allgeier and his colleagues have glued together thousands of cinder blocks to create 38 artificial reefs in a shallow bay on Abaco Island in the northern Bahamas, where the research takes place.

Coauthors of the paper are from the University of Michigan, Utah State University, Eco Logical Research Inc., North Carolina State University, and the University of Washington.

Funding for the work came from the National Science Foundation. A grant from the Packard Foundation will support future research on super-urinators and their ecosystems.

Source: University of Michigan

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It may one day be possible to detect prostate cancer from a simple, non-invasive urine test, a new study shows.

Researchers say they’ve made significant progress toward development of the test, which uses RNA and other specific metabolic chemicals in the urine.

As reported in Scientific Reports, researchers used RNA deep-sequencing and mass spectrometry to identify a previously unknown profile of RNAs and dietary byproducts, known as metabolites, among 126 patients and healthy, normal people.

The cohort included 64 patients with prostate cancer, 31 with benign prostatic hyperplasia and prostatitis diseases, and 31 healthy people with none of these conditions. RNA alone was not sufficient to positively identify the cancer, but the addition of a group of disease-specific metabolites provided separation of cancer from other diseases and healthy people.

“A simple and noninvasive urine test for prostate cancer would be a significant step forward in diagnosis. Tissue biopsies are invasive and notoriously difficult because they often miss cancer cells, and existing tests, such as PSA (prostate-specific antigen) elevation, are not very helpful in identifying cancer,” says senior author Ranjan Perera, an associate professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center member.

“We discovered cancer-specific changes in urinary RNAs and metabolites that—if confirmed in a larger, separate group of patients—will allow us to develop a urinary test for prostate cancer in the future,” says first author Bongyong Lee, and a senior scientist at the Cancer & Blood Disorders Institute.

The researchers emphasize that this is a proof-of-principle study for the test, and it must be validated in additional, larger studies before it is ready for clinical use.

Additional coauthors are from AdventHealth, the University of Florida, the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, and the Shanghai Second Medical Institute.

The National Institutes of Health, the Florida Department of Health, Bankhead-Coley Cancer Research Program 5BC08, and the International Prostate Cancer Foundation, Southeast Center for Integrated Metabolomics funded the work.

Source: Johns Hopkins University

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Clues in urine have allowed researchers to discern whether people are wealthy or at risk of poverty.

If you eat whole grains, vegetables, and dark chocolate, you most likely belong to the most economically prosperous segment of society. If, on the other hand, your diet is low in protein, salty, filled with additives, and there are longer breaks between your meals, you probably belong to the poorest segment.

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen’s department of food science observed that the diets of the rich and poor leave different fingerprints on metabolism, as evidenced in urine. This is the result of a comprehensive analysis of 2,700 urine samples from 1,300 people in five European countries.

The findings include:

• Citric acid and hippuric acid were found in higher concentrations among the wealthy than the poor. Low levels of these two acids in the body are associated with—among other things—a deficiency in protein, fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.
• Lithuania was the country where economic differences were most pronounced in urine samples.
• Finland and the UK had the most divergent diets.

“The most striking thing is that across gender, ethnicity, and nationality, we were able to discern between those who earn more and those who earn less—from their urine,” says Alessia Trimigno, a postdoctoral researcher in the department of food science, and lead author of the study.

Your urine changes promptly in response to what you eat and your overall health. All body fluids contain thousands of so-called metabolites—residues of the body’s metabolism—which advanced analytical technologies can detect. Unlike blood, which is slower to respond to changes in the body, urine provides a “real time” status of the body’s disposables.

Metabolites reveal much about diet, current health, and a person’s predisposition to various diseases. Despite the promise, researchers still only know about 1% of the roughly one million different metabolites.

“We know that metabolites can tell us a great deal more about human health and wellbeing than genes. However, we need more knowledge about how to decode these metabolites. This study marks an important step forward,” says associate professor Bekzod Khakimov of the department of food science.

The study is part of a larger research project, headed by professor Søren Balling Engelsen of the University of Copenhagen, that has identified nutritional deficiencies in people at risk of poverty. The goal is to develop new, low-cost foods with the right nutritional composition for this group.

Within this context, researchers who extract useful information from large chemical data sets (chemometrics), have analyzed urine samples from Finland, the UK, Italy, Serbia, and Lithuania. They have used a new method called Signature Mapping (SigMa) for metabolomics data processing that they invented and have had the opportunity to test over the course of the project.

The researchers based their definition of rich and poor on EUROSTAT income data. The findings appear in Molecular Nutrition and Food Research.

Source: University of Copenhagen

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A disease-detecting “precision health” toilet can sense multiple signs of illness through automated urine and stool analysis, according to a new study.

The “smart toilet” isn’t the kind that lifts its own lid in preparation for use; this toilet includes technology that can detect a range of disease markers in stool and urine, including those of some cancers, such as colorectal or urologic cancers.

The device could hold particular appeal for people genetically predisposed to certain conditions, such as irritable bowel syndrome, prostate cancer, or kidney failure, and want to keep on top of their health.

“Our concept dates back well over 15 years,” says senior author Sanjiv “Sam” Gambhir, professor and chair of radiology at Stanford University. “When I’d bring it up, people would sort of laugh because it seemed like an interesting idea, but also a bit odd.”

With a pilot study of 21 participants now completed, Gambhir and his team have made their vision of a precision health-focused smart toilet a reality.

Gambhir’s toilet is an ordinary toilet outfitted with gadgets inside the bowl. These tools, a suite of different technologies, use motion sensing to deploy a mixture of tests that assess the health of any deposits. Urine samples undergo physical and molecular analysis; stool assessment is based on physical characteristics.

The toilet automatically sends data extracted from any sample to a secure, cloud-based system for safekeeping. In the future, Gambhir says, researchers could integrate the system into any health care provider’s record-keeping system for quick and easy access.

Smart toilet checking for cancer

The toilet falls into a category of technology known as continuous health monitoring, which encompasses wearables like smart watches.

“The thing about a smart toilet, though, is that unlike wearables, you can’t take it off,” Gambhir says. “Everyone uses the bathroom—there’s really no avoiding it—and that enhances its value as a disease-detecting device.”

Although the idea may take some getting used to, Gambhir, a professor for clinical investigation in cancer research, envisions the smart toilet as part of the average home bathroom. In facilitating that broad adaption, Gambhir designed the “smart” aspect as an add-on—a piece of technology that’s readily integrated into any old porcelain bowl.

“It’s sort of like buying a bidet add-on that can be mounted right into your existing toilet,” he says. “And like a bidet, it has little extensions that carry out different purposes.”

These extensions sport an array of health-monitoring technologies that look for signs of disease. Video captures both urine and stool samples and then a set of algorithms processes them. The algorithms can distinguish normal “urodynamics” (flow rate, stream time, and total volume, among other parameters) and stool consistencies from unhealthy ones.

Alongside physical stream analysis, the toilet also deploys uranalysis strips, or “dipstick tests,” to measure certain molecular features. White blood cell count, consistent blood contamination, certain levels of proteins, and more can point to a spectrum of diseases, from infection to bladder cancer to kidney failure. In its current stage of development, Gambhir says, the toilet can measure 10 different biomarkers.

It’s still early days, though, with a total of 21 participants having tested the toilet over the course of several months. To get a better feel for “user acceptance” more broadly, the team surveyed 300 prospective smart-toilet users. About 37% says they were “somewhat comfortable” with the idea, and 15% says they were “very comfortable” with the idea of baring it all in the name of precision health.

Built-in ID system

One of the most important aspects of the smart toilet may well be one of the most surprising—and perhaps unnerving: It has a built-in identification system.

“The whole point is to provide precise, individualized health feedback, so we needed to make sure the toilet could discern between users,” Gambhir says. “To do so, we made a flush lever that reads fingerprints.”

The team realized, however, that fingerprints aren’t quite foolproof. What if one person uses the toilet, but someone else flushes it? Or what if the toilet is of the auto-flush variety?

They added a small scanner that images a rather camera-shy part of the body. You might call it the polar opposite of facial recognition. In other words, to fully reap the benefits of the smart toilet, users must make their peace with a camera that scans their anus.

“We know it seems weird, but as it turns out, your anal print is unique,” Gambhir says. The scans—both finger and nonfinger—are used purely as a recognition system to match users to their specific data. No one, not you or your doctor, will see the scans.

By no means is this toilet a replacement for a doctor, or even a diagnosis, Gambhir says. In fact, in many cases, the toilet won’t ever report data to the individual user. In an ideal scenario, should something questionable arise—like blood in the urine—an app fitted with privacy protection would send an alert to the user’s health care team, allowing professionals to determine the next steps for a proper diagnosis. A secure, cloud-based system would store the data. Data protection, both in terms of identification and sample analyses, is a crucial piece of this research, Gambhir says.

“We have taken rigorous steps to ensure that all the information is de-identified when it’s sent to the cloud and that the information—when sent to health care providers—is protected under HIPAA,” he says, referring to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which restricts the disclosure of health care records.

Next steps

As Gambhir and his team continue to develop the smart toilet, they’re focusing on a few things: increasing the number of participants, integrating molecular features into stool analysis, and refining the technologies that are already working. They’re even individualizing the tests deployed by the toilet. For example, someone with diabetes may need his or her urine monitored for glucose, whereas someone else who is predisposed to bladder or kidney cancer might want the toilet to monitor for blood.

Gambhir’s other goal is to further develop molecular analysis for stool samples. “That’s a bit trickier, but we’re working toward it,” Gambhir says. “The smart toilet is the perfect way to harness a source of data that’s typically ignored—and the user doesn’t have to do anything differently.”

The paper appears in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

Additional coauthors are from Stanford, Seoul Song Do Hospital in South Korea, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, the University of Toronto, Leiden University in the Netherlands, Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea, and the Catholic University of Korea also contributed to this work. The National Institutes of Health funded this study.

Source: Stanford University

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An aberrant immune response is behind recurrent bladder infections, research with mice indicates.

Those who are prone to the often-painful infections often report they have to “go” with greater frequency and urgency.

These two related conditions result from the aberrant immune response that prioritizes repairing tissue in the bladder wall over clearing the bacteria, according to the new study.

The researchers say the findings, which appear in Nature Immunology, improve the possibility of identifying more effective ways to treat urinary tract infections, or UTIs, which are especially common among women.

“Most women will experience at least one UTI in their lifetime,” says senior author Soman Abraham, a professor in the departments of pathology, immunology, and molecular genetics and microbiology at Duke University School of Medicine. “In a substantial proportion of these women, UTIs become recurrent with painful frequency.”

To study the immune response, Abraham and colleagues infected mouse bladders with E. coli. Throughout the body, immune responses to infections are generally balanced between bacterial clearance and tissue repair. However, in the bladder, the response prioritizes tissue repair—a tendency that increases with each successive infection.

Researchers learned that the bladder’s initial response emphasizes shedding cells from internal walls to reduce bacterial load. Large numbers of bacteria bind to bladder cell surfaces, so shedding this wall tissue is a natural immune defense. However, the sloughing process removes the thick plaque of cells that protects the bladder walls from salts and toxins in urine. Loss of this barrier exposes the underlying bladder tissue, leading to severe bladder wall damage and pain.

“Because of the harm urine can cause to the unprotected bladder wall, it is not surprising the bladder prioritizes recovery of its plaque-covered inner wall lining over bacterial clearance during infection,” says graduate student Jianxuan Wu, lead author of the study.

The pain that comes from urine-induced tissue damage is a greater immediate threat than the bacteria that persist in the bladder, according to the researchers. This focus on bladder wall repair hampers complete clearing of bacteria from the bladder, leaving behind pathogens that bloom into another infection.

With each recurring UTI, the researchers report, bladder tissue repair occurs more robustly and at a faster rate, resulting in a markedly thicker bladder cell lining. In mice that had experienced multiple UTIs, this physical change reduced bladder capacity and increased voiding frequency. Both symptoms are common among patients who experience recurrent UTIs.

“Our finding that the bladder’s predisposition to repeated infections is actually the result of an aberrant immune response could be welcome news because it raises the possibility of therapeutic intervention,” Abraham says.

Support for the work came from the National Institutes of Health.

Source: Duke University

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